Manually stopping/starting the default MySQL server

Last week I installed a default install of Applications Manager for evaluation and it worked great. Sometime over the weekend the application stopped running. I tried to restart but got an error that MySQL was not running. I found MySQL under the Applications Manager install directory but could not get it to start.

Can someone tell me the recommended way to stop/start the MySQL server that comes with Applications Manager? This is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.1.

I tried running mysqld_safe as root but got errors that it could not create ./innodb.status.25100 Permission denied. Since this used to work, I figured I must be starting mysql as the wrong user.

Thank you,
Andy