19 January 2010

Remote shutdown on Windows

This might sound useless or obvious to many, but i didn't know it and it made my life easier today...

If you ever need to shutdown a remote Windows machine, and you can't access it with Remote Desktop or similar tools, you can use Shutdown.exe from another Windows machine, like this: shutdown /m \\my-remote-host

Additional parameters can be seen with /? but the most useful ones are:

/r
reboot after shutdown
/f
force shutdown -- useful when the machine looks stuck, which is what happened to me today...
/d xx:yy
give a reason for reboot. See /? for the available codes.

I hope this means I can say goodbye to dangerous hard-reboots...

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