Download Psshutdown
Thomas Reed
Ok here's an interesting problem I've run into. I'm attempting to reboot some computers remotely using psshutdown and getting access denied errors unless I run the cmd from a cmd prompt that was run as admin. I myself am an admin on my machine as well as on the remote computer so my credentials should work just fine.
I have tested shutdown.exe but it wasn't working in my case and psshutdown did. I can try again to use shutdown.exe to shutdown a remote computer. Can you also use other credentials to shutdown a computer which is not on the domain?
I also tested to first logoff the console user with "psshutdown -o" but had the same same problem. Then I tested using "psshutdown -o" first and 20 seconds later "psshutdown -o" but the second one exit with an error because an action is already in progress.
You might need to add other conditions, such as getting it to exclude certain hardware depending on known criteria. Once you have identified your criteria, next is the trigger action. Click on the "Add New Action", and select "Execute an external program", this is where you can get it to do all shutdown steps. Because I'm using Windows as an example, I'd use psshutdown to do the work. Assuming I put psshutdown in c:\utils\ then the command would look something like this:
I'd strongly recommend using a dummy script for a while instead of the real shut down script, just to verify your alerting criteria are in fact correct, and you don't go shutting down your infrastructure by accident. You should also consider setting it so that the alert trigger doesn't go off until X minutes have passed, this is to avoid fluctuating temperatures or values. You can also use a reset action to stop the shutdown, for example with psshutdown you pass in -a and it'll abort the shutdown.
Are you using psshutdown as I gave in the example above? Does the user you have running the alert manager have admin access on the remote server? It will be needed to access \\servername\admin$\, you should verify that it has access. The other thing you may need to verify is that it is using the right values, instead of executing psshutdown like above, just call a .bat script and write the values to a text file, something like this:
Check the windows event logs on the remote server, psshutdown installs a service to do the actual shutdown. If psshutdown isn't working for you, you could use the regular shutdown command, or even some powershell.
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