Sounds like you have only remote access to the box? or is this just a case where you are trying to get a one-time problem resolved in short-time, and can get to it later?

Based on my SA skills (which is not professional) I would say you either have to get local access to the box, or contact an SA who can to restart the daemon. If the box is properly locked down methinks you should only be able to restart this locally. period.

That's right, I only have remote access. I am the a learning SA. Learning more now than ever. A faultly shell script that I wrote killed sshd but did not restart it. I just want to save the head engineer some head ache in going to the box and doing it.