I had a problem getting the forum to respond for awhile. Don't know which end it was on.

Rebooting the server _can_ make problems that are already there evident, such as if the boot configuration is not correct. My feeling is that it's always better to find that out when you are planning on working on the server, than during a crunch time.

Can rebooting itself cause damage? No.

The big risk is that the server will shut itself down (only happened once to me) or that when the server re-boots, you'll find that your network configurations or other configurations were wrong (or temporary) and need to be reset. But it won't cause your system to explode or anything :)

I would suggest if the pros are looking at the system, make sure they reboot it so you know it can be rebooted.

_KILL_ is a command you can execute as root. If you have a command panel like in Webmin, you click the process and terminate or end it.

do a ps aux to see your running processes

Then, kill PID (whatever the number for mysql is) to stop that process.

Do a ps aux again, to make sure that it's really all died off.

Then restart it with safe-mysqld command as per your system.

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