Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Need to kick my Windows Home Server every now and then

For some reason, my HP MediaSmart Server EX495 seems to be locking up.  It's very infrequent, but when it happens, I can no longer access it and I have to boot it with severe prejudice.  Something is crashing, but I have not been able to determine what is the culprit.
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I need to spend some quality time with my WHS box to figure out what the problem is.  In the mean time, I'll use the Roy Trenneman method, except via software control.  I want to get the box to reboot itself, once a week.

Ultimately, WHS is a child of NT.  I don't need anything fancy to schedule a restart.  The tried and true "AT" command will do the job.  This AT, not that AT.  What I need to do is pretty basic, I want to reboot the server  every monday morning at 6:00am.  To do this, I followed the following steps

  1. Open a Remote Desktop connection to the WHS, using the administrator account.
  2. Launch a command prompt (Start -> command).
  3. After the command prompt opens up, type the following text:
    at 06:00 /every:Monday "shutdown /r /t 0"
  4. Logout
We have created a scheduled task that will execute the shutdown command.  The "/r" parameter is what forces the restart.  The "/t 0" means no wait before restarting.  That should bandaid my server until I have some time to track down the root cause of the problem.  It will give me more time to ponder the question that every WHS user thinks about: "Why can't Microsoft market Windows Home Server?"