Can not RDP to Win 2003 box or initiate remote restart

Solution 1:

Try instead:

shutdown -r -f -m \\hostname -c "Comment goes here"

That's a bit drastic, but I've had the need to do that in a very similar environment to what you describe. I also open a cmd window and start a ping -t against the server to watch when the IP stack goes down and comes back up. This is a very useful indicator of activity when you don't have physical access to the server (or are too lazy to get up and walk over to it).

EDIT: (based on your comment) Ok, do this first and then try the above again (or restart it as normal if this works). See it that gets you farther. The -a will abort a system shutdown.

shutdown -a -m \\hostname

Solution 2:

I encountered the same issue trying to perform a remote reboot on a Windows XP machine. What I ended up doing was using the PsKill command, part of the SysInternals PsTools suite, to kill the Winlogon process, like so:

pskill \\hostname winlogon

This will cause the remote machine to reboot immediately.

Solution 3:

Well, this is kind of crazy but you can enable xp_cmdshell on SQL Server then execute commands as the user that is running SQL Server, so you can do a shutdown -r if it won't listen to remote commands.

If you want to try and re-start RDP w/o rebooting the box, you may try (this is untested; I'm not going to do this on any of my boxes :D):

Figure out what is listening on 3389 (RDP port) by asking for:

xp_cmdshell 'netstat -anO | findstr ":3389"'

Kill the pid with taskkill. Finally, issue a

NET START "TERMINAL SERVICES"

Hold your breath, then try RDP again.