Shutdown Windows machine from linux terminal

Command to shutdown windows system from linux -:

$ net rpc -S <ip address> -U <username>%<password> shutdown -t 1 -f

This command can be issued from bash or even set in cron job to shutdown the computer at a specific time and this command is shipped with many distros by default.

There may be more setup to do, especially for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and further windows versions, to allow remote shutdown:

Part A) On the Windows machine:

1) Add a remote shutdown security policy:

• run secpol.msc

• in the program tree, open Security Settings > Local Policies > User rights Assignment

• Find the entry Force shutdown from a remote system

• Edit the entry, add the windows user account that will be used for shutdown (ex: nouknouk)

2) Add registry keys to disable UAC remote restrictions:

• Run regedit.exe as Administrator

• Find HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System

• Create a new registry DWORD(32) value named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and then assign it the value 1

3) Start remote registry service:

• Open cmd.exeas Administrator

• Execute the two following commands:

  sc config RemoteRegistry start= auto

  sc start RemoteRegistry

Part B) On the Linux machine:

1) install the package samba-common:

It depends on your Linux distribution, but for Debian and derivated (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, ...), the apt-get command can be executed like that:

apt-get install samba-common

2) To actually shutdown your Windows machine from the Linux one, run the following command:

net rpc shutdown -f -t 0 -C 'message' -U userName%password -I xxx.yyy.zzz.ttt

Where:

• -f means force shutting down all applications (may be mandatory)

• -t 0 is the delay before doing it (0 means 'right now').

• -U user%password is the local user and his password on the windows machine (the one that has been allowed to do remote shutdown in part A).

• -I is the IP address of the windows machine to shutdown.