Restarting a remote machine: XP and Windows 2003

How do you restart a remote machine, like an XP controlled by remote desktop or a Windows 2003 server running terminal services? At least with Windows 2003 server you see a grayed out button when you try to shutdown or restart from a remote desktop session.

In Windows NT and 2000 you could install the “remote shutdown tool” on your remote machine but Microsoft pulled it, perhaps because they had a rather serious security problem related to remote shutdown in XP SP1.

I couldn’t find much Microsoft documentation on how this works for XP, but it’s still supported. Just fire up the command line and type “shutdown –i”. In theory you need admin privileges on the remote machine for this to work (the SP1 bug allowed non-admin users to do remote restarts with another tool).

I can confirm this works on Windows 2003 server, though there is a known bug that can affect some machines.

Restart or shut down remotely and document the reason explains how to do it. You have to know the machine name of the remote machine and you have to have admin privileges on the remote machine associated with your network name. Oddly enough the documentation there uses / for an option delimiter, but if you type “shutdown” the directions use hyphens.

From a command prompt “shutdown –i” gives you a handy GUI (you can tediously browse the network for the machine), or just type this command line (where N4591Fred is not my real machine name) …

shutdown -r -m \\N4591Fred –t 0 -c "bug fixes"

The command line example above will shutdown with no warning, but it still takes a few minutes to shutdown, restart, etc.

Update: I’ve been told that if you’re connected to a remote server you can run the “shutdown.exe” command from the remote machine command line. I haven’t tried that yet.

Legal BitTorrent sites. Who knew?

Sarcasm aside, it's useful to know that bitTorrent sites exist that are limited to legal content ...

Top Sites That Every BitTorrent User Should Know About | MakeUseOf.com

... If you want to stay out of trouble check out Legit Torrents and Legal Torrents which only list legal torrents. ...Public Domain Torrents - Lists torrents for downloading classic long forgotten movies in the Public Domain...

If you'd like to play with BitTorrent without impairing your ability to serve in the Obama administration, those links could be a worthwhile start.

Google Video Chat – at last, news from Google

We’ve been making extensive use of GVC for corporate collaboration.

It’s damned impressive, but there’s NO information from Google’s official channels on what’s going on with it.

There is, however, an authoritative source.

One of the lead developers has a personal blog …

juberjabber: Gmail voice and video v1.0.5

… Today we released the 1.0.5 update for the Gmail voice and video chat software. All current installations will begin an automatic update within the next 24 hours. If you do not want to wait, you can visit http://mail.google.com/videochat and re-run the installer…

They’ve done a lot of work on the Mac version. It was grossly unstable a month ago, but I’m going to be retesting.

Wanted a fix for iTunes Podcast 2 week shutoff

This is my biggest problem with iTunes: “iTunes has stopped updating this podcast because you haven’t listened to any episodes for two weeks”.

If I'm not extremely careful it can lead to my missing episodes of In Our Time!

I've been looking for a hack that would force iTunes to wait at least 8 weeks. This Apple discussion thread points to a blog post discussing a Doug's AppleScript that forces a regular bulk update.

Be nice if Apple fixed this, but meanwhile OS X iTunes users have a crude workaround ...

Time Capsule reviewed

Not only the best Time Capsule review I've seen, it might be the ONLY decent one written: Time Capsule brings high class, high function to Wi-Fi access points |Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager | InfoWorld

How many browsers really work with Google? Fewer than you might think.

How many web browsers are fully supported clients with Google's web applications?

Fewer than most people imagine.

Consider this acid test suite of Google web applications that I routinely use:

1. Gmail with Google Video Chat
2. Google Apps: Documents, Spreadsheet
3. Blogger and BlotThis!
4. Google Sites
5. Google Calendar
   
6. Google Page Creator*

Now consider this set of browsers I run against those apps** and the OSs I use with them:

1. Firefox (XP and OS X)
2. Safari (OS X)
3. Camino (OS X)
4. Chrome (XP)

Which browser(s) really work with all of Google Apps 1-5, or even 1-4?

Just Firefox. Even today's Chrome has obvious bugs, such as omitting the final character from a link created against an existing text string.

I assume IE 7 works pretty well too, but I can't speak to that. I'm surprised Chrome still doesn't work as well as FF against Google's own properties.

It's still incredibly hard to deliver full function "web 2.0" apps against more than one browser.

* On death row and supposedly due for replacement by Google Sites, but that seems to be on hold.
** I use IE 7 regularly against Sharepoint at work, but nowhere else

Tasks and calendar items - what I'd like

I really do spend too much time thinking about tasks, calendars, projects and the like. It recently occurred to me that I would like to see support for something that's a hybrid between a task and an appointment.

You could think of it as a task that has a date, time and span. Or you could think of it as an appointment that shows up on a task list and has a priority/urgency attribute.

The idea is that I'd schedule it as an appointment and it would show up in my task list. If I deleted the appointment I'd have the option of deleting the task, or just editing the task. If I deleted the task then I'd delete the appointment. Completing the task would leave the appointment untouched.

If I see anything like that I'll attach a note here.