Use mainline, everyone started from there.
You will have stuff to fix but most is already public or easilly googled.
Not sure what is "vanilla untouched", as it already have edits, so it isnt untouched at all.
reboot is rebooting the machine.
You dont need to reboot the machine just to restart the server.
Consider the dedicated as your home pc, you dont restart it everytime you want to restart your browser do you? Its the same thing here.