TechTips - How to Remotely Shut Down or Restart a Windows 2003 Server

As a server admin, it's good practice to do weekly maintenance on your servers and shut down and restart them once a week. This can be very time consuming if you have to remotely log on to each server, type your user name and password, and go through the steps of rebooting and typing in a reason, blah. This is way too much work when you can do it much easier remotely either with a simple user interface from your desktop or from the command line (both require admin rights on the servers).

So the first and probably easier method for most users is the shutdown -i command. This command line tool will bring up the Remote Shutdown Dialog box, which allows you to add your servers to a list and shut them all down at once. You also have a few settings you can choose to set or shut off before the shutdown.

Let's give it a shot, go to Start>>Run type CMD and hit enter. At the command line type in shutdown -i and hit enter, now you should have the Remote Shutdown Dialog window open. The first thing you will want to do is add your servers, to do this hit Add and type in the IP or Computer name of all the systems you want to reboot. Now you will want to choose what you want to do to these systems, I choose reboot but you can choose from shutdown, reboot, or log off.

You also have the option of warning users (anyone who might be using the server) that it will shutdown and give them a time limit to end their session. Since everyone knows I reboot weekly and I do it before anyone gets to work in the morning I uncheck this section.

The last set of options is for the Event Tracker, normally I leave the defaults and type in a simple comment like Weekly Reboots, and you of course can set these as you please. Now click OK, if ok is grayed out then you must type a comment before you continue.

There is another way that is all command line and some might prefer this method, both work the same. For this method we will want to go to Start>>Run type CMD and hit enter. Now this time at the command line you will want to type

shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName

Now let me explain the commands

/r reboots the machine

/s shuts down the machine

/m specifies your target machine

There are some other settings but to keep it simple we will only use the above settings. Once you have typed shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName and hit enter and your machine will reboot.

If you used /s command then the machine will shutdown.

That is all there is to this method. Both methods are effective and can be used however you choose, play around with them a bit and find which works best for you.

You can also create a batch file and reboot many servers at one time if you want. To do this all you need to do is open notepad and type a command like this

shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName1
shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName2
shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName3
shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName4
shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName5
shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName6
shutdown /r /m \\ComputerName7

Then go to File, Save As and when you save the file name.bat, then you can double click the Icon and it will reboot all of your servers at one time. This makes it easy to reboot numerous servers at one time.