Our network is split over 2 sites, right now our Exchange Server needs rebooting and I can't find anyone at the remote site that I'd trust to go in the computer room and press the reset button. There has to be an easier way, doesn't there?

For some reason I read your post as Remote Robot and assumed you'd built something really cool.

We use an APC SNMP controlled power switch (AP9212 with AP9606 card) which works really well although it's expensive. This would switch the whole machine off then on again.Other than that, you could always buy one of those phone controlled mains switches, I'm sure Maplin used to sell something like that. You ring it up, enter a pin and then you can switch the appliance on and off.

This company sell one

EDIT: Correction, this just seems to point back at Maplin although it does give a product number: A94BK

Ive always used psshutdown from the pstools suite by Sysinternals though Im not sure how well it would work with a pc having issues.

I've found this freeware solution:

http://www.newobjects.com/product.asp?Category=27

Thanks for the sysinternals link. I'm guessing that neither of these would work because I can't currently ping the server and they both reside on the server.

This hardware solution looks good but it'd mean opening up the servers:

http://www.servprise.com/info/

Any experience anyone?

I'd assumed you were punching the reset button because the machine had hung, hence the power switching.

I'd love to be able to punch the reset button (or any other part of the bugger come to think of it) but the server's half a mile away. Still haven't been able to get down there.

Epwc, I've got a program called POWEROFF.EXE that will reboot a server remotely, as long as you've got an administrator password for the remote server. You don't need poweroff.exe to be installed on the server in order for it to work.

The only thing is... it's software. And as such, it doesn't have the ability to actually cycle the power. All it can do is essentially the same thing as selecting Start Menu-> Shut Down-> Restart.

What this means: If there's something going wrong with the server in question... For example, if there is a program that's locked up on the server, and that lockup is preventing the system from shutting down gracefully, then it'll do what any Windows box does when you select Shut Down from the Start Menu: What'll happen is all the OTHER programs on the server will shut down and the computer will fail to restart.

So if you don't have anyone to actually go down there and push the button as a last resort, you might not want to experiment with poweroff.exe.

Edit: I just noticed the part where you said you couldn't ping the server. Of course no software solution will work if you can't ping the server. Sorry.

Still, for the future, poweroff.exe is a very useful little program to have in your tool kit.

Thanks Tony

I'll try that one too. Just got back from the other site, the server is fried, won't boot at all, engineer booked. First time I can remember having a hardware failure on a server (still got a PII AST running), this was our only Dell server.

Our company uses Poweroff.exe on ever computer to make sure they go off every night at something like 3AM. Seems to do the job

Windows XP en 2003 server have a command line utility called "shutdown".

This utilty will not only shutdown or reboot the local host, but also remote hosts,
even ones that don't have this utility (eg windows 2000).

shutdown -r -t 0 -m \\exchangeserver

wuould reboot your exchange server from your XP workstation.

Pim

What hardware do those servers run? Most modern (past 2-3 years) Proliant servers come with integrated remote managment solutions that can be used to powercycle the box, and older models can have a PCI card added to do the same thing.

I'm aware of Dell offering similar, but I can't say for certain if theirs are standard yet.

If you've got IIS installed (and you probably do for OWA) take a look at "iisreset" which can also reboot a box. In fact it will even reboot the box if stopping and restarting IIS doesn't suceed cleanly..

I wasn't aware of the "shutdown" command in Win 2K/XP, we've got a mix of servers, 2 are still on NT4.0. I'll look into the IIS thing too, lots of options eh?