Restart Services

Using this feature, you can restart a service (usually a daemon) on your web server. Daemons are small processes that run in the background of your server.

How to restart services

Take these steps to restart services on your server.

Restarting may be helpful if you have changed a service’s configuration or if the service is experiencing problems.

By default, you may restart the following services via WHM:

• DNS nameserver (named/BIND or NSD)
• FTP Server (ProFTPd or Pure-FTPd)
• HTTP web server (Apache/httpd)
• POP3/IMAP email server (Courier or Dovecot)
• POP3 server (cPPOP)
• Mail server (Exim)
• SQL server (MySQL)
• SSH server (openSSH)

Restarting a service will not work if the service is stopped. If you wish to start or stop a service, refer to the Service Manager feature in WHM.

To restart a service:

1. On the main Restart Services screen, select the service you wish to restart.
2. When asked whether you wish to restart the service, click Yes.

Troubleshooting (advanced users only)

Restart from the command line

If a service will not restart from WHM, you may want to try to restart it from the command line.

First, try to restart the service using the server’s restart script. Type: /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/restartsrv $service. Replace $service with one of the entries in the column on the left below:

Restart directly from the command line

If this does not work, you can attempt to restart the service directly. The location of the service depends upon your operating system; however, for many distributions, services are located in the /etc/init.d/ directory.

To search for the init.d directory, try one of the following commands:

• locate init.d
• ff init.d
• find / -name init.d

To restart using this method, type the path to the service followed by the restart command. For example: /etc/rc.d/init.d/$service restart

• Replace $service with the name of the daemon, such as exim, named, proftpd, httpd, etc.
• Some distributions keep services in different locations. You may use the ff, locate, or find command to locate the service you would like to restart.

If the restart fails, you should check the service’s error log. It can be very useful for diagnosing problems.

Each service logs its errors differently, so you will need to check the service’s documentation to find the error log’s location. Following are some examples of useful error logs and their possible locations; of course, results will vary depending on your installation.