WHM – System Reboot

WHM offers two modalities of reboot: Graceful and Forceful. In every single case you should use only (really, only) the graceful method. The graceful method will kill all the running processes before sends the reboot signal, forceful on the other hand will only attempt to kill the processes.

If you are used to Windows operating systems, you know about the Shut Down command. Graceful reboot in WHM is similar to the Windows shut down command: it will stop every running process, save states, synchronizes the file system and so on. When everything is done, it will restart the server. The graceful reboot in WHM is very similar to the reboot command on Linux systems, but it’s not exactly the same. For example while the reboot command broadcasts a message, informing every logged in user about that the system will soon restart, WHM’s Graceful Reboot will not do that.

Forceful Reboot on the other hand will only attempt to stop the running processes. If it fails, it cares not about it. With a bit of exaggeration, it’s like when you push the Reset button on your PC. You should only restart your server this way if the Graceful method doesn’t work for some reason. So, when you try to reboot your server, the actions to take are the following:

1. Try the Graceful Reboot
2. If the tool reports the Graceful reboot has failed, you try the Forceful reboot

When is advised to reboot a server? The occasions are extremely rare. The Linux systems are not Windows to reboot the whole server just because you installed DirectX. I really think that the only reason to reboot if you’ve done kernel update.