how do i shutdown certain machines on the network?

[oioldman]

shutdown.exe is already installed on XP Pro PC's, so you don't need to install anything - Try it and see what happens.

Maybe the others do need admin rights to install them so ask your admin to install it on them if it means you can do your job more quickly and efficiently.

[keschrich]

I recently accomplished similar goals at my middle school: I wrote a perl script that uses WOL to turn on all of the lab computers, and then another to shut them off at night.

As far as WOL goes, the only thing I can say to you without knowing the specifics of your problem is to make sure that you are passing the wakeup command the MAC address of the target computer, not the IP address or Windows Host Name. The reason for this is simply that as long as the computer is turned off, it does not have an IP or computer name, but the MAC is permanent and unique.

For shutting down, if you're running Windows on your computer, which I assume you probably are, you can run shutdown.exe with the name of the computer you would like to shutdown. In my case, I am running this script from a Linux machine, so I use "net rpc shutdown ..." which is included with Samba.

My problem is this:

Despite the fact that the school, and it's labs, close at 3:30, some people are inevitably still using the computers. As much as I'd like to tell them that the labs are closed and they need to save and go home, that is not an option. I, too, would prefer not to need to install additional software on the target machines, although it is a possibility if absolutely necesary. Given that (sort of) restriction, is it possible to shutdown only the computers that are not logged into by any users?

[Martin Zugec]

You could check for Logged on locally users... Parse the output and create corresponding action (for example using psloggedon from sysinternals)