Restarting a JUNOS Software Process

To correct an error condition, you might need to restart a software process running on the router. You can use the restart command to force a restart of a software process.

Caution: Do not restart a software process unless specifically asked to do so by your Juniper Networks customer support representative. Restarting a software process during normal operation of a routing platform could cause interruption of packet forwarding and loss of data.

To restart a software process:

1. Make sure you are in operational mode.
2. Type the command:

   user@host> restart process-name < (immediately | gracefully | soft) >

   • process-name is the name of the process that you want to restart. For example, routing or class-of-service. You can use the command completion feature of the JUNOS software to see a list of software processes that you can restart using this command. For more information on using the command completion feature, see Using CLI Command Completion.
   • gracefully restarts the software process after performing clean-up tasks.
   • immediately restarts the software process without performing any clean-up tasks.
   • soft rereads and reactivates the configuration without completely restarting the software processes. For example, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peers stay up and the routing table stays constant.

The following example restarts the routing process:

When a process restarts, the process identifer (PID) is updated. (See Figure 13.)