Restart, turn off and remove

Where the controls are

Open Your Macs and select the Mac. The buttons sit together under its status: Disconnect public access, Restart server, and either Turn off server or Start server depending on what Linux is doing. Restarting and turning off need the Mac online and running an up-to-date MacServe app; if the app is older, the panel says which control it cannot offer yet rather than failing when you press it.

Turning Linux off is not the same as disconnecting public access. Disconnecting leaves Linux running and stops the relay carrying traffic to it. Turning off shuts Linux down, which frees the CPU and memory it was holding back to macOS.

Turn off, and start again

Choose Turn off server and confirm. Your websites, apps and SSH sessions stop until you start it again. Your files, databases and installed software are kept exactly as they were — this is a shutdown, not a delete.

This is the control to use when you want your Mac’s full CPU and memory back for something else. While Linux is off, the Mac itself stays connected to MacServe and keeps reporting in; the panel shows the Mac as online with its server stopped, not as a Mac that has gone missing.

When you want it back, the same button reads Start server. Give it a moment to finish booting, then check that your own applications came back up — nothing restarts them for you unless you set that up inside Linux.

Restart

Restart server reboots Linux without shutting it down first. Apps and SSH sessions are interrupted and your files are preserved. Save your work before confirming.

One power command runs at a time. If a restart, a stop or a start is already queued or running, a second request is refused with a message naming the one in progress rather than quietly replacing it. Queued and Running are not success: wait for the Mac to report that the command finished.

Remove a Mac from your account

Remove this Mac appears only while the Mac is offline. Quit MacServe on it and wait for the panel to show it offline — removal is refused while it is still reporting in, because the Mac would simply reappear at its next check-in.

What happens: the Mac disappears from your console along with its public-access settings, and the free MacServe addresses on it are released. Your custom domains are kept and become parked, so you can point them at another Mac afterwards; that is an ordinary domain edit, not a re-verification.

What does not happen: nothing on the Mac itself is touched. Linux, your files and your installed software stay on that disk. Removing a Mac here is an account action, not an uninstall — if you also want the server gone, delete it in the MacServe app on the Mac.

If a command does not finish

A queued command expires if the Mac never accepts it, and the panel says so instead of claiming success. Check that the Mac is awake and online and that the MacServe app is running, then try again.

Do not delete and recreate your Linux server to clear a stuck power command. Nothing about a pending restart or stop damages the VM, and recreating it is the one action that does lose your files.