psshutdown runs out of steam

[howartp]

To prevent it stopping at a machine already shut down you could always use a Magic Packet utility to turn all the machines on first, then run the shutdown script.

I just use a batch file with the SHUTDOWN command. It does hang if the machine is already off, but soon moves onto the next computer in the list.

The problem with this, both with the magic packet to wake the PCs first, and the shutdown batch script, is you need all the machine names/MAC addresses, whereas telling each machine to shut itself down would avoid this issue.

Peter

[Alis_Klar]

Easiest way I've found of shutting down machines is to create two batchfiles.

Set one to run at machine startup with the commands;

at /DELETE /YES
at 21:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F "\\domain\netlogon\shutdwn.bat"

This adds a scheduled task that calls a script called shutdwn.bat on the netlogon share at 9:00 pm every day. You can adjust this as you need to of course.

Then in the shutdwn.bat file, simply use this command

shutdown -s -f -t 60 -c "End of day shutdown. Please save your work now, this workstation will shutdown in 1 Minute. This cannot be cancelled."

Which obviously calls the windows built in shutdown command, and displays the appropreate message.

This works like a charm for us and has done for the last year. It's pretty flexible as well as if you ever need to change or cancel it you can simply change the shutdwn.bat file accordingly. Every month or so we make it call defrag insted of shutdown.

Incidently, do not name the batchfile 'shutdown.bat' else it will run itself in an endless loop!

Mike.

I think we'll use this but we'll make different batch files for each room so we can alter the shutdown time for a particular room. We already have each room in it's own OU so it should be easy!

The only issue with this approach vs a server issued shutdown is if you need to keep the machines on later than usual at late notice but it does get around the speed slowdown issues where the server hits machines that are already off.