I wish minerd had a backup pool option!
That's actually pretty easy to implement using a wrapper script. Here's a very basic example:
https://gist.github.com/2053044This is just a very simple example that makes the miner fail over to a different pool if the current one fails a given number of times.
Using commands such as
timeout you can implement all the strategies you want. The possibilities are endless.
I'm sure there must be a way of doing that on other operating systems, too.