Admin: Auto-rebooting Windows 2000 Nightly

I am not sure what it is about our operating environment, but not only is it locked down, but it’s unstable. I don’t blame our SA’s for this situation, however, because I know they aren’t the ones responsible for this. I blame our technology solutions group, whom have too much power within our organization and too little understanding of technology in general, and business requirements for each functional unit in particular. But that’s a political issue, and another story. So for me, a nightly reboot is a definite must. But one of the strange things is I cannot just issue a shutdown command using the task scheduler, for some reason the request is completely ignored. My best guess is this is due to some botched domain right issued by our esteemed solutions provider. I tried several different shutdown commands, and to no avail. I have, however, found 1 that does do the trick very well for our finicky Windows 2000 desktop from BeyondLogic.

The instructions on their site are incredible thorough. But for grins, here is how I have mine setup. Like almost all of my scheduled tasks, the executable for the program resides in C:\auto_rpt\bin. To schedule the task, I simple ran the following command from the DOS prompt:

at 22:00 /interactive /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su c:\autp_rpt\shutdown.exe –s reboot –f -l 1

Now, every night at 10:00 PM, my computer reboots for me. Typically I am not in the office at 10:00 PM, so this does not disrupt my workflow. The only drawback to this program is it does not make an entry in the event log to verify a restart. Fortunately it is not difficult to verify a restart, since the Event Log service does make an entry when it is stopped and started, not to mention the startup entry in the event log.