Yes, honestly there is only one time you should ever have to reboot (aside from installing/removing hardware) and that is when you want to install a new kernel.
Also there are several other ways to restart daemons/services. I will tell you the command line way as it is probably the same on both RedHat and Mandrake. There are graphical ways to do this as well but brush over the man pages on these two simple commands for managing your services: "chkconfig" and "service". They control how the SysV init scripts are configured in "/etc/rc.d/rc[0-6].d" directories, which should be just symbolic links to service scripts contained in "/etc/rc.d/init.d" directory.
"chkconfig" and "service" popped up a couple of releases ago and are easier to understand if you are unfamiliar with the SysV init process. "chkconfig" will also manage your inetd/xinetd services such as ftpd, telnetd, fingerd etc..
The commands should be located in "/sbin", make sure you "su -" first.
"service smb restart" would be the same as the command I gave you earlier "/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb restart".
[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]