Using Windows Home Server’s Command-Line Tools : Working with the Command-Line Tools (part 4) - Shutting Down or Restarting a Computer

SHUTDOWN: Shutting Down or Restarting a Computer

You can use the SHUTDOWN command to restart or shut down either the Windows Home Server computer or a remote computer on your network. Here’s the syntax:

SHUTDOWN [[/R] | [/S] | [/L] | [/H] | [/I] | [/P] | [/E] | [/A]] [/F| [/T seconds]
 [/D [P:]xx:yy] [/M \\ComputerName] [/C "comment"]

					  

For example, to restart the local computer in 60 seconds, use the following command:

shutdown /r /t 60

When you enter the SHUTDOWN command, a System Shutdown dialog box appears and counts down to the shutdown time (see Figure 19.4, later in this section).

To document the shutdown, add the /D and /C switches, as in this example:

shutdown /s /d p:1:2 /c "Installing internal hard drive"

The reason code given by the /D switch and the comment specified by the /C switch appear in the event that Windows Home Server generates for the shutdown. You can see this event by launching Event Viewer (select Start, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer), opening the System log, and looking for a recent item with Event ID of 1074. Figure 1 shows an example.

Figure 1. A shutdown event records the reason and comment that you specified with the SHUTDOWN command’s /P and /C switches.

To shut down or restart a remote computer, you must run SHUTDOWN using the remote computer’s Administrator account. This requires you to use the RUNAS command-line tool:

RUNAS /user:ComputerName\UserName cmd

For running SHUTDOWN with the /M switch, UserName will be Administrator and cmd will be the SHUTDOWN command, enclosed in quotation marks. Here’s an example that shuts down a remote computer named OFFICEPC in 120 seconds:

runas /user:officepc\administrator "shutdown /s /m \\officepc /t 120"

When you enter the RUNAS command, Windows Home Server prompts you for the account password:

Enter the password for officepc\administrator:

Type the password (it doesn’t appear onscreen), and press Enter.

runas /user:officepc\administrator "shutdown /s /m \\officepc /c \"Comment\""

					  

This works fine on XP machines but not on Windows 7 and Vista PCs, because the Administrator account is disabled by default on Windows 7 and Vista systems. Here are the steps to follow to enable this account and set its password:

Figure 2 shows an example of the dialog box that Windows 7 users see when the shutdown event is launched. Figure 3 shows the XP dialog box, which is also what the dialog box looks like on Windows Home Server.

If you need to cancel a pending shutdown on a remote computer, run SHUTDOWN with the /A switch before the timeout interval is over:

runas /user:officepc\administrator "shutdown /a /m \\officepc"