[spencercw]

CentOS has a great utility called needs-restarting which finds processes which have been updated and need to be restarted. I just stick it in a cron job and I have an email waiting for me in the morning if I need to do anything.

[eikenberry]

Debian and child distros also have this via the needrestart, packaged under the same name, or checkrestart, in the debian-goodies package.