Tonight I applied the patch to the two servers that run the blog site and one (Yoda) got stuck on shut down. Fortunately the other (Brianna) didn’t so I was able to go to her and run a shutdown command of
shutdown -r -m \\Yoda
Mind you Philip recommended that I do a shutdown -r -f -m \\Yoda as that will force the reboot. Now in a real production/we need this up all the time/server you would be wise to install a remote IP device that would allow you to get access to the server below the operating system. Many of the quality servers have this with special network cards (iLos for HP, DRAC for Dell).
If you start moving more things in a hosted setting, having remote management below the OS level is key.
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Agreed, Remote Management Modules such as iLO (HP), DRAC (Dell), RSA (IBM) and RMM (Intel) are mandatory for any remote management of servers.
For equipment/PCs where there’s no remote management module option, I’m quite fond of the iBoot and iBootBar devices.
http://dataprobe.com/iboot-remote-reboot.html
http://dataprobe.com/ibootbar-remote-reboot.html
I think there has been something released in latest windows patches or something that is causing this – we’ve have 5 or 6 servers hang on a remote shutdown in the past month and even shutdown -f (which we normally use) has failed to boot the box. Unfortunately this has meant someone on site having to “push the button”