Power reset: when all else fails

The reset button, which provides the ability to reset software contained in hardware and force it into a know state, has been long used to reset computing devices that have either become frozen or disabled. What happens when no one is around to force a reset? In this paper we propose that an application must always have the responsibility for ensuring that its hardware devices are up and running and for resetting them when they are not. We describe a technology and its implementation that supports the notion of power reset. We describe a software framework supporting power reset, and describe an interesting application using our power reset framework that keeps an ADSL Internet connection up and running.