My operation manages security updates for a number of clients running SBS. This is a process we handle remotely, and have the process down to nearly a science. Every once in a while, we encounter hiccups, but not very often. This weekend, we found several servers that got “stuck” in a state following a restart request where the server was still up, but it wasn’t responding to RDP requests.

This behavior has been noted by several folks in the community, but it’s been a hit and miss prospect to figure out what’s going on. Well, at the time you’re trying to get updates installed for a client, you’re not really all that concerned about the “why” of it all. You just really want to get the server back to a point where you can connect in to it again without having to go onsite. And given that we manage servers all across the US, going on site just isn’t an option.

Some folks have taken to using third party remote control tools to access their servers rather than relying just on RDP. Still it’s possible that these services, like the TS service, get stopped when the server restart command is issued and a remote connection still isn’t possible.

Fortunately, with SBS, we still have an option available to us to help get the server restarted so we can get back in: Remote Web Workplace. In all of the cases we encountered this weekend, it was only the TS service that got shut off, so we were able to log in to RWW, connect to a workstation at the site, and get the server restarted from there.

But wait, that’s the real magic of this post - how to remotely restart the server when you cannot connect to it by other methods, but it’s still alive on the network. Here’s how:

  1. Log in to the workstation via RWW as the domain administrator.
  2. Verify that the server is actually “alive” by connecting to the server with the Computer Management console:
    1. Right-click on My Computer on the workstation and select Manage.
    2. Right-click on Computer Managemen (Local) and select “Connect to another computer.”
    3. Enter the name of the server and click OK.
    4. If the connection succeeds and you can browse the event logs on the server, you’ve got a good connection.
    5. From within the Computer Management console, you may be able to restart the service that got stopped, in this case the Terminal Server service. expand Services and Applications and click on Services to see the list of services. Find the service in question and see if you can start it. This may still not get you what you want, so you may need to proceed with the steps to restart the server.
  3. Open a command prompt on the workstation.
  4. Type “shutdown -r -m \\servername -t 5″ (without the quotes) and press Enter. This will restart the server servername after a 5 second delay.
  5. When you get kicked out of the RWW session to the workstation, you know the server has finally restarted.

There are lots of things you can do with the shutdown command. Type “shutdown /?” to see what the various options are.

If you encounter this problem and do NOT have an SBS server (and therefore no RWW to access another workstation), you could make a VPN connection to the network and remotely control another workstation from there. The key thing is to make sure that you are authenticated as the domain administrator when you issue the shutdown command or you’ll get access denied errors and still won’t be able to do anything. Or if you have remote access into a workstation on the network using some other means, the same shutdown option will still work.