Bat File Blues

[powellm]

Hey Guys,
I've been doing a little bit of .bat scripting here in the Underground, and I've hit a bit of a snag. I need to write a file that will monitor the system time and reboot at a certain hour. I know how to determine the time, and how to reboot, but monitoring constantly and triggering at the appropriate hour are eluding me. Any suggestions?

[powellm]

Followup:
My solution doesn't necessarily have to be a .bat file, but it needs to be deployable through group policy.

[dparm]

It is possible to force a reboot or logoff when the GP updates. Here are some of the optional switches for the "Gpupdate" command.

/Logoff. causes user to logoff after GP refresh
/Boot. causes reboot after GP refresh

[powellm]

I want it to reboot everyday at a set time, so I dont think that solution will work.

[dparm]

Could Ghost or DeepFreeze be configured to do this? I get the feeling that you cannot really force a restart at a set time every day without some sort of 3rd party software.

[dparm]

I found this:

http://www.computerhope.com/shutdown.htm


Dunno if it helps, but it does explain the syntax of the "shutdown" command.

[powellm]

I've got the syntax down for "shutdown." The problem is how to trigger it at the appropriate time. As for Ghost and DeepFreeze, the machines have neither. Any idea if theres a way to add tasks to the windows scheduler remotely?

[dparm]

Not sure, let me do some research tomorrow when I'm in.

[fturtle]

I'd suggest using the "Scheduled Tasks" utility in Windows.

Windows XP doesn't have a sleep program/command for use in batch files, unless you install the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en). That means your loop wouldn't have any delay (insane) unless you acquired this (or another) sleep program that can wait a certain amount of seconds.

With "Scheduled Tasks" (in control panel) you can just set Windows to run a program (or batch file, or other file) every day at your specified time, etc. The batch file would have nothing but the shutdown command.

It'd be possible to set up a looping batch with the sleep program the kit provides, but it'd be more practical to use "Scheduled Tasks," since this is what it's supposed to do.

[jharriso]

Use PStools with the following command executed at startup.
psshutdown -2300 for, say, 11:00 PM
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pstools.shtml

Muy useful toys.

[fturtle]

Nice, even better.

[dparm]

SysInternals comes through again!

[powellm]

But once again, is it deployable through group policy?