Django and Mezzanine troubleshooting

Inherited a Mezzanine site built by someone else at work. Having trouble with the local_settings.py file.

We have two sites and each uses a different local_settings file. One file works great, and the other doesn’t seem to upload any changes to the site.

My questions are:

Will the local_settings.py file throw an error if it doesn’t match the database criteria when you deploy with fabric?
Does the USER part of local_settings.py have to match the USER on the database local_settings?
AND to make changes to local_settings.py, I have to manually restart the development server. How do I do that?

Thanks!