[grogotech]

I am using an ubuntu server distro as a general management and backup server in a small business with windoze XP.

The business owners insist on having their machines turned off over night, they are freaked out about the potential for fire. They must have had an exploding computer or something at some time.

Anyway I need to do backups of the local user data for each machine and make sure the virus updates and windoze updates occur.

I have used wakeonlan to turn each computer on, but I can't seem to find a solution for turning them off again.

I tried to convince the business users to use samba shares to store their data, however they like the arrangement as it is.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Pat

[RobinVossen]

you can put

shutdown -s -t 1080000

in the boot from Windows

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Robin

(else you can do it with OpenSSH on the Windows Box to gain shell)

[grogotech]

Robin,
Thanks for the information. I didn't really follow the Windows boot option you suggested. However I guess this would always apply when the machine is booted. I want to be able to force a shutdown when I need it.

Anyway I have been working on a solution from your OpenSSH solution. I actually installed OpenSSH and got the shutdown to work. However I had a problem with openSH that it would not allow connections until the service had been restarted after boot. I found several discussion of this, but no real solutions.
I installed a minimal installation of cygwin and this worked fine. There are some additional advantages to cygwin over openSSH for some other ideas I have.

Thanks again.

Pat

[RobinVossen]

Ah, well What Id do is set Win32 Cryptcat Liserning in the boot.
There a milions of ways to do that.
Then you can control the PC using teh Windows CMD using Cryptcat on Windows.
What you also can do it put cygwin_OpenSSH in there.
Net-Force | Library

[bigtomrodney]

Have you seen Winexe? It's the Linux equivalent to psexec from sysinternals. Might allow you to script reboots.