Nightly Reboot Job

Current system:
Windows Server 2003 Standard SP2
24x7 Scheduler 3.1.0

Created a job to reboot the server every night at a specific time. This works great except every few days (random) doing morning server checks the server is stalled at 'grey' screen (been doing this for awhile now). As if it started the shutdown process but stalled. I can RDP to the server fine but any console connection such as VNC it's stuck at that 'grey' screen. I've copied below the job information and the batch syntax; also the schedule.log during the failure...

Job:
Nightly Reboot 10:45pm
- Run program or document file
- Command line: C:\shutdown.bat
- Window size: Normal window (checked) Asynchronous process
- Host: Local
- Job Run-time Options: Queue: [default] Priority: Normal
- Run this job: Daily or Weekly
- Start date: 09/1/2007 Start time: 10:45 PM
- Days of week: Every day except Sat/Sun (checked) Skip this job on holidays
- Nothing checked on Step 8 of 11
- Nothing checked on Step 9 of 11
- Nothing checked on Step 10 of 11
- No description needed Step 11 of 11

Shutdown.bat Syntax:
c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe /r /f /y

Schedule.log:
9/15/2008 22:45:00 0 4 Nightly Reboot 10:45pm Job started.
9/15/2008 22:45:02 0 4 Nightly Reboot 10:45pm Job finished.
9/15/2008 22:45:33 2 12 New Job Job New Job execution error. Exit code: -1.
9/15/2008 22:45:33 2 14 UserWorksetMonitor Job UserWorksetMonitor execution error. Exit code: -1.

It's very weird, works great except random failures. When stuck I manually reboot during morning checks... any help appreciated...

Paul

When this happens again, check which applications are still running. If you see a pattern in applications running when restart fails, try first killing these applications then doing the restart.

KillProcess might be helpful in such case http://www.softtreetech.com/24x7/archive/49.htm

Awesome thanks, I'll keep an eye out next time this happens to look for stalled/hanging threads and implement the KillProcess if this is the case.

As an FYI... I use this same job and batch for 3 other servers (same OS and 24x7 version) with no issues.