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You've probably heard that old saying, "When in doubt, reboot." There can be many reasons why you might need to reboot a system from applications that leak memory to problems caused by patching. And while rebooting a system to fix an issue isn't an elegant solution, well if it works, it works. Right?

Unfortunately, sometimes when you try and reboot a remote system it may not behave as expected. For example, one business I know has scheduled reboots for one of their servers using Task Scheduler and the shutdown /r, but from time to time the reboot fails for no apparent reason, even when using the /f (force) command. How can you make sure your server reboots when you tell it to?

One thing you can try is to write a script that shuts down problematic applications and services running on the server in an orderly fashion. This approach can be helpful with servers running Microsoft Exchange for example, since some Exchange services have large amounts of data cached and may take a considerable time to shut down properly. The Script Repository on Microsoft TechNet has a sample script you can customize to shut down services on a system. Then, once you've run your script and shut down all problematical services and applications, you can try running the shutdown /r command to restart the system.

But what if you need to reboot a remote system immediately, but you've had issues using shutdown /r in the past? In this case, you can try using the following script to reboot your system:

strComputer = "<name or IP address of the remote system>"
Set OpSysSet = GetObject("winmgmts:{(Shutdown)}\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2").ExecQuery("select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where 
Primary=true")
For Each OpSys in OpSysSet
       OpSys.Reboot()
Next 

This script works by invoking the Reboot method of the Win32_OperatingSystem class on the targeted computer, and it requires that you have the Shutdown privilege on the remote computer. I've been told (by those in the know concerning product support) that this method can be a "more forceful" method of restarting a system than the simple shutdown /r command.

ITworld.com

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