In a microsoft domain is there a way to reboot all clients at once?

Question

Let's say your remotely installing software through group policy. You need to reboot all clients/servers for the software to be updated. How would you go about rebooting all of them at once over LAN/WAN? I really don't want to code a program so any help will be welcome

Yes i know all about the shutdown.exe command but you would have to do it one at a time... with over 3000 clients that would be to much

No each department keeps a list of the computers. There is a master list in active directory but why would i want to copy and past each and every client. Again there has to be and easier way. Thanks though. I do know scripting and thats what im trying to avoid. 3000 clients to much time to list each and everyone one.

Answer 1

There are several ways of doing this. Windows should have a tool built in - shutdown - simply type shutdown /? for instructions.

Alternatively, you can use PSSHUTDOWN from the PSTOOLS kit, available for free.
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Why would you have to do it one at a time - don't you have a list of the machines you can just run through a script? Even if you don't know how to script, PSSHUTDOWN can use the machine list to shutdown a list of machines.

Alternatively, here's a SAMPLE command line using for and net view to shutdown systems:

FOR /F "tokens=1" %a in ('net view ^| find "\\"') do shutdown -r -m %a

If you just have a list of machines, you can use this instead:
FOR /F "tokens=1" %a in (machinelist.txt) do shutdown -r -m %a

If you turned this into a batch file, you'd need to double the % symbols

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I don't see how scripting is difficult to do this - I provided two examples. I had to reboot 600 clients a few years back and this was not a problem. Your only other solution would be to use some third party management tool. I guess I don't understand why exporting a list of computers from AD into a simple text file and running PSSHUTDOWN would be such a lengthy process - I could probably do this in an hour - 5 minutes once I'd done it a couple of times.

When you say "code a program" I assume you mean write something in vbscript or a C variation. I don't consider scripts to be programs and I don't consider programs to be scripts. Scripts run a series of programs in my mind. Anyway, how long do you think it would take to write a small ADSI script to pull computer names from AD and dump them in a text file (save the script and you'll never need to write it again) and then execute a simple command containing less than 80 characters from a command line?