Discussion on:

Schedule a restart operation with Windows XP's Shutdown utility

Unfortunately the sad reality is that a "fresh reboot" is usually REQUIRED for a Microsoft OS....

Everyone who's read this article and is thinking of doing this - maybe it's time to start thinking about Linux workstations?

XP just isn't a business OS - lets face facts.

a business based OS. I would take a guess at maybe MILLIONS of users helping their companies make MILLIONS of dollars using xp workstations. And yes I do use Linux some and like it a lot. I just tend to be more open minded than my hardcore Linux friends. Bashing an OS gets you no where fast. If it were Linux that had the market share there would more Linux bashing. All this is about is trying to knock the big dog down. Its the popular Linux thing to do.

Emar is dead on.
If Linux was on 98% of computers, it would be the same story.
Asking for a perfect OS is like asking an IT person to stop whining about Windows. Ain't gonna happen.
If Windows ran perfectly, most of us wouldn't have jobs.
If you're so brilliant, write your own OS that's perfect.

QUOTE: " If Windows ran perfectly, most of us wouldn't have jobs.
If you're so brilliant, write your own OS that's perfect. /QUOTE

Yes, yes, yes and yes! I've been saying this for so long I thought I was beginning to think that I am the the only person who thought so.

Build a better mousetrap and they will come and any other idomatic clich? you want to come up with.

kwitcherbitchin and deal with it. If you have the $$ to go start your own firm and have a 100% decision ability on what OS you run, or if you can top MS do it. But unitl then, put on your big kid skivvies and deal with it.

You have a good point suggesting people to live with the reality of the current situation, yet I believe this discussion is about finding ways to improve on flaws of most widely used OS in the business environment.

Shutdown.exe is a good tool to restart a computer, but lets consider another method. Most business users do not have their PCs run anything when they are not at work. Why not save electricity and improve lifespan of machines by actually powering the computers off. For majority of users this makes more sence than scheduling automatic reboots.

...because that is when we push out updates, new software, etc. We are currently rolling out a bi-weekly restart of systems.

ag691234 writes: "Why not save electricity and improve lifespan of machines by actually powering the computers off."

Are you sure of this? In most organisations it is not the PC that sucks the power oout of the system it is the monitors. And turning off PCs overnight is not as effective as you'd like to think. When else can I run Defrag Commander on my boxes, push out updates via sms or MOM and run any other tasks that I have to do?

Andrew Martin

with the advent of the LCD monitor, power consumption by monitors has dropped substantially, in fact an investment in a LCD monitor to replace a CRT monitor will probably pay for itself within 2-3 years or sooner based on power cost savings alone.

PC's do use alot of power, power hungry cpu's, hungrier video cards, motherboard fans, power supply fans, faster harddrives & faster optical drives and every other device installed in that pc uses power, alot of it. Don't fool yourself into thinking that pc's are energy efficient machines. There is a reason those machines get hot! Plus that heat can have deteriorating effect on the pc's components. These pc's all have power buttons, use them!

You may be using defrag commander to schedule defrags but couldn't you just have users leave their machines on friday evening when they leave for the weekend so that you could accomplish your mass defrag via defrag commander plus push out whatever windows/office updates are required by your workstations and maybe even schedule virus/spyware scans during the weekend when users are not likely to be using their machines?

It just seems like a lame excuse that you need to leave the machines on during the week so that you can defrag them.

There are other ways to do things, you just have to be willing to do them. PC's use alot of power, becoming energy smart & more efficient will ultimately save you alot of time & money. Who wouldn't want that?

The problem is that Linux is more stable, secure, and structured than MS OSes.

I really don't want to repeat about 50 of my posts, so just look up my posts on this and read them.

The problem is that Linux is more stable, secure, and structured than MS OSes.

I really don't want to repeat about 50 of my posts, so just look up my posts on this and read them.

NT

When you install XP, you are greeted with something like 'Welcome and congratulations to the best media playing OS', and so was it with W/2000.

Nowhere do they tell you that 'This is the fastest, most stable and securest system for doing business transactions.' On the contrary MS in the EULA tell you explicit NOT to use it in critical areas. The most unsecure parts of it commonly agreed to be IE, and Outlook are impossible to get rid of - even if you have no use for them.

If it can be built it can and will be broken. There is NO OS out there that is beyond being broken in to. If I built ABC OS I would also state in the EULA the same thing. Why should I take the fall for a admin not configuring systems the way they should, or at least to the best it could be done. That really isnt a valid point you tried to make.

If Microsoft intended XP to be for business use only, there would not be an XP Home edition. Take your XP Home edition and attempt to log onto a domain and you'll quickly discover that Microsoft never intended XP to be strictly a business OS. Windows and Linux both have strong points, and also weak ones. Unfortunately most people tend to stress only the strengths of their favorite system and only the weaknesses of other systems. If I stated that I had a new OS which I wanted everyone to use, I would stress it's strengths and how those strengths make my OS the best. I would not even consider listing my OS weaknesses since this would keep people from trying my system. I think that those posting to a TECHNICAL discussion like this one might better present themselves by stating that Linux can schedule a restart (if you want to do one) by using the "at" command, or adding "shutdown" to one's crontab file. Linux has been able to schedule shutdowns and restarts since the early days of the OS. Microsoft has finally recognized that it may be beneficial and added the command to the system without bothering to tell anyone that the option exists, or how to use it.

I just replaced Linux OS for two medium sized businesses here locally with Windows Server 2003 Small Business Premium Edition and magically all of theor problems went away. Linux is OK if you like DOS. I rarely see Linux running the show anywhere without an ungodly amount of scripting. Someday when Linux grows up and develops it may become Vista 2. Who knows. Happy days all.

I need to update several PC's weekly to update various files, is it possible to schedule these over the network, they all have XP Pro.

You can run shutdown.exe from the command line and use the -m switch to specify a remote pc on the network:

shutdown -m \\pcname

I would image this would work equally well in a scheduled task although I haven't tried it.

Vince, yes it's possible :o)
You can do the updates and reboots too, all over the LAN/WAN/or internet if you desire. Since theres alot of assumptions here, to better answer your question and to assist you, I recommend learning Cscript or WSH (Wscript) - the Windows server operating system has many system and local environment variables to utilize look at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/default.mspx to begin. Also, when you've gotten your feet wet, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/createit.mspx. Both are good resources for script administration. Another helpful item(s) you'll need to be familiar with to be a good Windows Administrator is to click Start/Help and Support Center, and search for "Command-line reference A-Z" - without the quotes. Many of the enviroment variables can be manipulated with the commands that will appear. Best of luck. A

I think this is what this forum is for. I think I see a 'PRO'. ppl that care

I've been using the shutdown command for just that purpose. I've even been using my office XP machine to remotely reboot our Windows 2000 servers. It works like a charm. I used to either spend an hour on a Sunday evening rebooting all of them or have to get up early in the morning to do the critical ones before anybody got in.

c:\windows\system32\shutdown -m \\servername -r -t:60

Reboots the server and allows a 60 second warning just in case someone (more than likely, me) is working on the server and forgot about the reboot. I doubt it will ever happen since I scheduled them for a 6-7 AM reboot in 5 minute intervals.

use the command

shutdown -m \\computername - r -t 60

don't use a colon,
you'll get an error and have to retype the command,

All in all, I think this is a great command, you can even use the comment (-c) switch and write in a little message that will appear on the remote system during the countdown before the shutdown

you can also use shutdown -i to bring up the GUI interface for this command and select several machines to reboot/shutdown, set the time for this process, include any messages, etc.

I don't think this command gets enough advertising/praise (especially the GUI version) and alot of newer admins that don't know about this option could save alot of time with this function.

I don't advocate leaving winxp/2k/9x workstations powered on indefinitely.

PC workstations should be shut down at the end of every work day. Heck, even your home pc shouldn't be left on 24/7. The only devices left on almost all the time are my servers and even they get a break every now & then for maintenance & testing.

At work, you have a few issues: leaving user workstations powered on is a security risk, even if the user locks (ctrl-alt-del and click on lock computer) their winxp/2k/nt workstation before leaving for the day, depending on your network infrastructure, the computer is potentially available to be hacked into - no such thing as perfect security: routers, hardware & software firewalls, passwords, etc. can all be broken into depending on how saavy the hacker is. Turn off your workstations to eliminate that risk (even turn off Wake on LAN in bios settings to lock down that pc ).

Also, not too much mention thus far on power consumption. PC's use alot of electricity and alot of users probably fail to make use of standby/hibernate features. Energy is expensive and if you have several (hundred or thousand depending on your company) workstations left on 24x7x365, that's just money you're throwing out the window. Also, I've seen some power supplies fail in my lifetime, I would hate to come to work to find a smoke filled atmosphere because of a power supply that bit the dust (trust me it happens) and took the computer down with it. Not to mention wear & tear on the pc from constantly being left on, computers get hot and that affects how they perform (cpu's get slower as they warm up), give those pc's (and printers and other electronic devices) a break. How hard is it really to shutdown a pc and turn it on when necessary, maybe it adds 2-3 minutes to your schedule - big deal.

Use less energy, reduce your energy bill, save money and while you're at it you're reducing pollution and saving the environment and ultimately being more secure - that's being responsible & power smart.

- just my 0.02 cents cdn...
rob,wpg

Instead of just locking the machine, as you said, you can actually log off. Also, you must remember that if you backup things on the workstations, such as system state or users documents you need to leave the machine on for it to be backed up

that in a work/office network environment,
you're probably going to have users saving their information on a file server (in separate pre-designated user home directories) because it's easier & quicker to backup contents stored on one machine rather than having a backup server perform a separate backup operation for every pc on your network. Most workstations don't come with raid setups so their is no safeguard against harddrive failure. If a workstation fails and the data on a specific workstation hasn't been backed up, you lose everything. Getting users to save their data on a network file server eliminates this problem because your server is running a decent raid setup, getting backed up nightly to some form of storage media. If a user workstation fails with this setup, you just image another machine and get the user up & running with an hour and none of their data has been lost.

Also, technically even if a user logs off a machine and leaves it powered on, if a hacker gains access to your network and has achieved some form of elevated adminstrative privileges he can access the drive contents on any workstation connected to the network regardless if the user is logged off or not. Powering off the workstation eliminates this problem.

I would also add that not only should the workstations be powered off at the end of the workday in this scenario, you should also setup power-on passwords in the pc's bios settings - this way a user/hacker can't get windows to even start unless the correct power-on password is entered.

Trust me, I know that this all sounds like security overdose but we live in different times, I wouldn't have considered any of this stuff 10-20 years ago but with so many deviant hackers/$hit disturbers on the net nowadays it's better to be a little paranoid than lax when it comes to the security of your workplace network and all of the data contained by the workstations & servers on your network.

On top of that as I mentioned in a previous post, you're using alot less electricity by powering off your workstations at the end of the day, which saves alot of money and reduces pollution - who wouldn't want that?

You're absolutely correct. This auto restart is nothing more than a gimick. Can you imagine being away on holidays and this set up is not turned off!

instead of automatically rebooting the machine, why not schedule it to shut the machine down?

If you don't have anybody working past 12am until 6am, that's 6 hours of electricity...

fwiw, I recommend that people shut down their machines once a week... typically on weekends, and start fresh on Monday morning (or Sunday, depending on when the start of their week is...)

This scheduler could go ahead and shut their machine down over the weekend for them, if they forgot to do it themselves... pretty cool feature!

This is quite long. But I wanted to share my work with those Linux people that think XP cannot support major tasks with minimal effort.

I "push" out updates all of the time to the machines in my building. Have over 600 PCs and notebooks. You can do a great job of pushing out work with Tivoli or Alteris. We have both in our Enterprise. But using DOS scripts allows me to have total control over making "right now" updates.
I have found that over half of our machines were using a Server in Memphis instead of the one in Nashville. We have enough network problems related to bandwidth w/o needless traffic.
It may be just a coincidence that ya'll are discussing "Restarts". I will be pushing out two scheduled jobs for every machine in our office tomorrow morning. Using DOS, the AT command and the functionality of XP I can push out these jobs to every machine.
One will run every Mon and Thu in the early AM to defrag C:. The other will run every Sun and Wed in the early AM to "restart" the machines. Now I now someone is going to saw there is no need for defragging twice a week. Your partially correct. The machines are in dire need of defragging and I have had to defrag machines as much as 5 times in a row to get them really clean. So twice a week for a month or two, then I push out a new AT command for each machine to only run once a week or once every two weeks.
No there are some on you who have been criticizing XP for reboots required. I have found that XP is quite stable (unlike NT) and frequent reboots aren't necessary to keep the OS stable. BUT......our enterprise pushes out MS hotfixes all of the time along with patches that support our enterprise applications. All machines have the UpdateIT utility on them to allow users to force the updates w/o waiting for the pushes or because many times the enterprise pushes fail due to network problems. For the UpdateIT util to work correctly, it needs a reboot to ensure that if one of the hotfixes needed a reboot before another hotfix could recognize the hotfix was installed and could also then be installed.
But our users are very production oriented and must account for their time. They have no desire to take any extra time to run a script from their desktop. So I pushed out a CMD file to All Users\...\Startup that call the UpdateIT utility and points it to use our local server instead of the main enterprise server many states afar. Now I am not at the mercy of the users running UpdateIT or again severely degrading my bandwith by going to the enterprise server which supports tens of thousands of machines.

... but have some lovely parting gifts!

Seriously, I have windows server systems and xp systems that only get rebooted once every couple of months; and they don't really need it then. Usually it's just something I'm installing or uninstalling that requires a reboot.

Steve G.

I have two rackfulls of machines that haven't been rebooted for over a year, and probably won't be rebooted for another two when I take them out of service.

Now, let me count how many are running windows. Oh look! not one.

?Boss, Degadar just told me that if we just changed our OS to a 'open' one that we would not have to reboot our servers for over a year! ....??! What???... Training... old files..??....
?No if we backup all the old MS word files as .RTF then clean them up a little, reformat them and save them in an open format no prob! ..?
?No the same for all the other formats,...hard? ... Oh no nothing..,?
?as for training.. hell I think all this open stuff is as close to Windows as you can get.. I think that retraining will not be needed.?
I will note after we roll out to FreeOS.lix, This department will be able to save a few $$ and I think this free $$ that will be generated by laying off most of our IT crew could be used for, lets say, well it's been a few years, it's about time I saw a little pay back on all my hard work?

I regularly leave my system up for weeks at a time with no ill effects. The unfortunate thing is that microsoft has not figured out how to install a patch without restarting the system. So take your M$ Bashing unstable platform C**P and go tweak some settings in /etc.

BTW, I think Linux is great but you have to support what your organization uses.

What is the benefit of a daily restart?

tia

I have had a few Windows 2000 Servers go for up to 6 months without rebooting, these servers have SQL 2000 on them too, but then we start to get problems were users can't login to their databases, so we restart and all is good again.
But I think 6 months is pretty good, even with Netware servers, there is patches that I apply every 3-8 months that needs a server restart anyway.
Doesn't kill us to restart does it?

Regards,
Jim

thank you, roger and randy

Have you close all programs and shut your computer down to complete the install. I have seen this on all software and hardware installs. On every thing from IBM, AIX to windows.
If you do an upgrade, ether to a work station or server it will update the system or the kernel (the main processor of your operating system) Yes a reboot is needed for this.

It's called VMS, what Microsoft stole from Digital Equipment (DEC). Now, after making a mess of it, it's called WNT/2000/XP/Vista. Why was it called WNT? Because WNT are the next letters of VMS silly! There was a reason why the uptime for the operating system was a 3 character field then had to be bigger: the record for a VMS system running non-stop is 18 YEARS!!! Not uncommon for system to run for over 5 years without booting, running all sorts of application. Its still around.

Although it is nice windows xp has shutdown.exe built in 2000 doesn't and that is what my servers are. I use psshutdown from www.systernals.com which is free and can do everything and more.

One other thing I use is a Wake On Lan command for many of my computers. In the BIOS you must set the WOL to start up. Then from a command line you enter the MAC address and the computer will wake up. At home I have an HTPC which is on 24x7, but I have it wake up other PC's in the house to get them started for the day in my attempt to save a little electricity. I use this at work as well, starting a PC, doing a LIVESTATE backup and then a PSSHUTDOWN. It's perfect, but a bit of maintenance.
Jake

Rebooting to have a Fresh machine ???

FRESH ? really hope you are meaning washed up...
an operating system requiring a reboot to operate correctly IS NOT an operating system
is a MESS (using mess, but the correct word is another one)

WORST
2003 rerver reboots each week, at the best... thrre was the worst currently... and it was the "Microsoft Never Rebot System". How Happy I am

WORSTER
I've other three Unix Freebsd based servers, running since 6 months...
using a fraction of CPU, a slice of hard disks...
AND NEVER REBOOTING !
What are they running ?
Firewall, mail, internal web server, external webserver, DHCP, DNS (a server runs a splitted horizon DNS), webProxy, portAuthorizationProxy, SAMBA !
Enough ?!?!?!?!

Who said a reboot is *required*??? First of all we are talking about XP here, not a server class OS. A freshly rebooted system will always run better, the questions is how *much* better..... It's almost always the apps that cause the problem, not the OS.

I run over a dozen W2K servers 24x7 and only reboot if there is a problem (usually hardware) or an update is installed.

Hank Arnold

I dont know why people are hell bent upon taking Windows for a reboot. I have had instances where my WinXP & Win2K desktops have run without any problems for more than 4 months. Ditto for many servers that I've seen!

The only time I usually reboot is when a patch is installed or a hardware is upgraded.

Ahhh... finally a bit of common sense - from someone who actually uses XP!

rebooting!

Sadly to say...
I've installed thousands of update and patches to Unix Systems,
and except to MAJOR kernel upgrades... I was never required a reboot !

My W2k servers reboot daily if the windowsUpdate is set to auto !

and my w2k3 server... just the same
If it is due to Microsoft patches or other reasons... I simply DO NOT CARE!
It reboots!

Because of low life trouble makers looking for ways to damage Windows, MS has to patch the OS. If people spent the same amount of time and energy trying to mess with the "beloved" Linux OS, Linux would cease to exist.

To Randy,Roger, and others for your replies.

tom of course is not wrong, as anybopdy cannot prove opposite.

but...
if you have some programming experiences in Unix and windows you shall have noticed some subtle difference
if not, try these simple tests.
try to allocate 50GB memory in windows and Unix. notice that windows try to allocate, starting a swapping sequence lasting half an hour (P5, 4GB Ram, 800GB HD)
Unix answers allocation error, according to its actual resources.

try to open a file and exit a program without closing that file.
Then with a system monitor watch opened files.
Unix has left none.
Windows has a peculiar counter... Orphan FILES !

try to write in a foreign memory of kernel or other applications!!!
In windows IT IS POSSIBLE, even if with some (little) effort!
In Unix... you get nuts !

Maybe you are true, Tom! but maybe NOT!

This is JUST an example

why M$ OS is considered uncontrollable ?
Many reason , here comes one.
because service/users policy are inconsistent.

Everybody knows that a service can be started under a user account. So I can create a user, assign to a Service logon priviledge and make a service run under this account.

I Install a service, create a temp directory for that service.... and expect life to flow quietly!

I just discovered CA Brightstore ArcServer Service made my W2k3 ActiveDirectory server crash. It saturated the root directory with more then 2000 .TMP files, reporting an error. a Stupid error : "cannot found cartridge xxx".
Of course this is a Application error (should not report 2000 times the same error in less then 2 minutes!)
of course it is NOT ( :8 ) OS fault if the service wrote 2000 files!
BUT THE OS ALLOWED IT TO DO IT IN THE ROOT DIRECTORY!
which was filled COMPLETELY! and why should an OS crasch , just due to some TMP file wrote in a directory ?

Try to do this under unix, and you will find out your app cannot simply write files in root directory, outside it's own created with priviledge assigned directory

Sorry. m$ Os is UUU
Unstable, Uncontrollable, Untested!

AAA looking for a tough Operating System!