Sometimes servers become unresponsive. You can’t RDP, you can’t get in via console, yet you still want to give them the common courtesy of shutting down gracefully. These commands will allow you to do just that. I would establish a persistent ping to the IP of the server you want to shut down, run the command, grab a beer, give it at least 5 minutes to see if the pings drop off, and come back as the system restarts.

REBOOT REMOTE MACHINE

shutdown -r -m \\SERVERNAME.DOMAIN.LOCAL

FORCE REBOOT REMOTE MACHINE:

shutdown -r -f -m \\SERVERNAME.DOMAIN.LOCAL

If attempting to do this from a PC that is not a member of the same domain/network that you are rebooting, you may need to specify credentials:

net use \\SERVERNAME.DOMAIN.LOCAL

U: administrator

P: ***************