So I’m sure some of you are in smaller environments and don’t have a PC Management system in place (SCCM, Altiris, Etc). I created a Powershell script that sends the command and also does error logging. The results of the script are sent via SMTP.
In this case, I created a script that runs at 2am local time and created a scheduled task on the server to run the Powershell script. The basic functionality is that it reads a Active Directory Group to get the Computer Names you would like to reboot. It then attempts to send a Shutdown -R command to all machines. It will keep track of the results and then send a HTML formatted E-Mail via SMTP. Feel free to modify the code to save to a file if you would like instead. This script uses Quest’s Powershell Active Roles commands. I would recommend you down them also.
HTML E-Mail with Results:
It worked before you broke it 