While I personally think what you're doing here is a kludge and is likely to cause problems for your Mac clients down the line (unless you couple this with forcing restarts every few days to help keep them working well), its not my place to really judge this, so I'll stop there other than saying I would encourage you to keep pressure on your vendors, both Apple and NetApp, to come up with a real resolution to the problem.
That out of the way, to make my post useful, you'd want to create a LaunchAgent that you can deploy to all your Macs into /Library/LaunchAgents/ which would look something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.org.restartFinder</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/bin/killall</string>
<string>Finder</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>7200</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
You'd save the above as something like com.org.restartFinder.plist, move into /Library/LaunchAgents/ and set the POSIX permissions to 644 and root:wheel as the owner:group. Package it up in something like Composer and use it as a deployment.
To load this LaunchAgent automatically after its installed, you will need to add a postinstall script that uses some code to load the agent as the logged in user. This can be added directly to the package install, if saved as a .pkg, or added as an after script in a Casper policy.
#!/bin/sh
loggedInUser=$(stat -f%Su /dev/console)
loggedInUID=$(id -u "$loggedInUser")
if [[ -e "/Library/LaunchAgents/com.org.restartFinder.plist" ]] && [[ "$loggedInUID" -ne 0 ]]; then
/bin/launchctl asuser "$loggedInUID" sudo -iu "$loggedInUser" "/bin/launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/com.org.restartFinder.plist"
else
echo "No user logged in, or plist was not found. Exiting."
exit
fi
Once this is installed and loaded, the Finder should restart every 2 hours, as indicated by the StartInterval section in the LaunchAgent (7200 seconds)
Hope this helps.
