Remote Restart/Shutdown All PCs

[karan_jhr]

Hi

I am looking for a third party solution to be installed in our student lab computers to reboot or shutdown all computers by a single click

i tried various WOL (Wake on Lan) solutions but they work for individual machines.

Is there any free tool for it?

I dont want to do it via shell

 

thanks

[LeMarchand]

It's 2233h here, so not at school to confirm (and I set it up some time ago) but I think we use https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psshutdown to shut down the suite and and WakeMeOnLan - Turn on computers on your network with Wake-on-LAN packet to wake 'em up. It's on a schedule that turns the machines off after school finishes and then wakes 'em up for updates overnight and stuff.

[LeMarchand]

Just checked, and my memory hadn't failed me.

 

WakeMe wakes up the suite at around 1900 (from off and sleep) when updates are checked for/installed. Runs again around 2000 in case any of the are snoozing as Shutdown (which runs soon after) didn't seem to shutdown machines that are already asleep. Suite is W8.1.

 

If you've already moved to 10 I think the preference is not to turn the machines off at all, but let them go into the lowest power state. This should still allow updates to be applied.

[Oaktech]

Yup PSShutdown here, again, on a schedule. 0 Touch. We do the whole site. Every single non critical machine. Off at either 1630 for student machines or 1900 for staff machines. On at 0730 for staff machines and 0845 for student ones. Obviously this depends on wired connections for WOL.

[speckytecky]

Senso, Impero etc can do it for you as well.

[LeMarchand]

Senso, Impero etc can do it for you as well.

 

I didn't think those were free, though I guess the OP might have them already for other purposes.

[karan_jhr]

I used Faronics Deep Freeze, it was awesome in this kind of scenario

Looking for a similar app to be installed on target machines and to be recalled when needed

[Fazza]

RemoteRebootX can be scheduled to shutdown/restart computers and it's free. You have to manually add computers to it but you can save the settings in a file and if you schedule it to reboot/shutdown on whichever days you like.

[dapaulio]

Wrote my own script which composes a list of computers that reply to a ping then shuts those ip down using remote shutdown cmd

Runs as a task from a server at 4:30 pm then used to have them WOL at 8am.

I used to use WOL in the morning but the school head and business manager was not convinced they were shutting down and therefore were wasting electricity, despite me showing them the logs.

Now the staff have to turn them on when required 🤯

[AlanD]

You might well decide to stagger the WOL, especially if you have hundreds of desktop computers. I think I would set it to switch on around 25 every 5 minutes or so. The problem is that all the Machines GPOs will load....and Antivirus updates will install...and your network - and those stations that have booted...will grind to a halt possibly to the extent that some may experience timeouts and fail to complete the operations you were expecting them to do.

 

...and WSUS updates...and maybe you would like the AV scan to complete before the PCs get used.

 

Laptops are a particular problem - because they often don't support WOL. And if you don't start these...they will be in every practical sense unusable for the first class of the day...because turning on what wight be a slow laptop with GPOs, WSUS and AV updates all appearing across wireless can easily take 20 minutes or more for a class set. And make sure they don't sleep or shut down when lid is closed...(screen can go off though)....and make sure everyone knows not to press shutdown on them. Class can often have a very poor experience of using laptops unless someone is tasked with turning them on before the start of the day.

Edited September 9, 2018 by AlanD

[mavhc]

You might well decide to stagger the WOL, especially if you have hundreds of desktop computers. I think I would set it to switch on around 25 every 5 minutes or so. The problem is that all the Machines GPOs will load....and Antivirus updates will install...and your network - and those stations that have booted...will grind to a halt possibly to the extent that some may experience timeouts and fail to complete the operations you were expecting them to do.

 

On the plus side all the files required will be cached in ram on the server