Workstation Scheduled Shutdown

Nelbert

Hi,

I've done a bit of searching and not found a working solution to this.
I've one of my servers dishing out the windows updates I approve and they install at 5 pm every day.

That's fine and working and I'm chuffed I've got that far by myself but I'm trying to schedule the PC's (all XP SP3 and as of today fully updated) to shutdown at 7 pm (to leave plenty of time for any updates to install).

I'm using Server 2008 R2 to set up all this through Group Policy and I've set up the scheduled task under the Computer Configuration / Preferences section that opens shutdown.exe with the -s -t 180 arguments (timer is there for me to see it's work instead of just shutting down as I can cancel it while the timer is running).

Main problem is this scheduled task is only created / update (I've it set at the default update setting) under Domain Admin accounts and isn't created for normal users.

Any suggestions? Or is it actually scheduled but just isn't visible to non admin users (I don't have it set to hide tasks or anything so it should be visible to end users although once it's working I'll be locking out normal user access to the Scheduled Tasks part of Control Panel).

Any help / opinions are welcome, I would prefer sticking with the GUI of Group Policy as opposed to scripting unless someone is willing to offer a script that will work without too many changes.

JDxtra

Are you using WSUS?

The GPO for Windows Updates contains settings for install times, restarts etc. I think the default is to allow a restart if required - you can even specify a time and if the restart should be forced. I would not go messing with additional scheduled tasks to perform restarts.

p.s. the norm would be to install updates over night (e.g. 3am) - not in the early evening when staff could be still using the PCs.

tk123

What I do is .... (on a 2003 domain)
- The WSUS GPO contains a startup script to create the scheduled task if it's not already there - it gets created on all machines - if i run to a machine it's listed in the tasks
-The WSUS GPO has the options to reboot after the update even if somebody is logged in (our users never log out).

Jumpy

Scheduled tasks only run as the user you set it to. It doesnt mean it only runs when that user is logged in.

If you set it to run at 7pm it will run. As the specified user. Which for a forced shutdown script should be at least a local machine admin.