Boot, reboot, and shut down a system normally

Boot:

Press the start button on your server/PC :)


Reboot:

I normally use init 6, which sets the runlevel to 6.This is the reboot runlevel.

shutdown -r now will reboot the system immediately

The time element can also be entered as +m, so that the following command will reboot the system in 3 minutes


shutdown -r +3 


and this will reboot the server at 10:35



shutdown -r 10:35

Finally, you could use reboot

Shut Down:

I normally use init 0, which sets the runlevel to 0.This is the halt runlevel.

 shutdown -P now will shutdown the system immediately.

You could also use poweroff.