Remote Shutdown

It’s the ultimate in laziness, I suppose. But there are nights when I don’t want to walk into our office to shutdown the workstation in there. I might have my laptop downstairs, or outside, or in my room, and I just don’t want to have to go through the hassle of doing a manual shutdown.

So I was floored when I read the article “Did you know? Windows Shutdown.exe has a built-in GUI?. This is exactly what I had needed, and it was in Windows all along.

The command line shutdown (’shutdown’ from a command window) is useful, and I have used it for years. It allows you, among other things, to shutdown or restart a machine. I have used it in batch files so that when I am using VPN to get to my work machine I have the ability to do those actions (which are not available through the standard channels). I have also scheduled those batch files to run to automatically shut down the machine every night to conserve energy.

At home, though, without VPN, I had no way of doing a remote shutdown easily. My half-hearted attempts to code a method didn’t work out well. I decided to just get off my duff and shut the machine down. Reading about this method, though, gave me hope.

I tested this out on my machine (XP Pro against an XP Home machine). Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work, and as of press time, I was unable to track down any help on the error “Directory Service Is Not Available”. I will keep looking, though. This would be really cool.