[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] The Reboot problem - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Fri, Sep 15 2006 12:07 bradley

The Reboot problem

We've been chatting about an issue that we've been seeing (and posts like Vlad's alude to) that rebooting sometimes doesn't ...or other patch issues that may be an issue to your remote clients.  We're seeing that the reboot mechanism in Microsoft update... well.. it just isn't... and when the server doesn't come back, you have to madly attempt to get back into a workstation to send it a remote reboot command.

Remote into an internal workstation, and issue "shutdown -r -t 0 -m \\server\\servername
-r = reboot
-t 0 = timeout of zero
-m = name of remote machine you want to reboot (in this case the server)

Some are recommending ILO cards to be able to get on that box no matter what.

But I think all these workaround and hacks we are doing to get into the box after Patch Tuesday doesn't points to an underlying issue with MU's reboot mechanism that isn't getting looked into.

What about you?  You seeing this issue on Servers and Workstations?

Filed under:

# re: The Reboot problem

Friday, September 15, 2006 3:48 PM by WorkingHard

Servers Manual, Workstations using WSUS. Over 127 PC patched since tuesday and about about 20 Servers a mix of W2K, W2k3 x32/x64, Windows XP on the clients, no SBS servers and not a single issue. All works as supposed to and it has for many years on hundreds of machines in my own sites and customers except for some isolated emergencies due to conflict with a running 3rd party defrag, hardware issue ... etc ... Biggest "fear" with paching is 3rd party software breaking. We've seen more issues due to not pachting than because of patching.

# re: The Reboot problem

Friday, September 15, 2006 4:57 PM by Bucky

I get a little under 1% failure for workstation reboots every scheduled patch day. The odd bit for me is that it isn’t always the same set of machines. The workstations tend to hang during shutdown after logoff, at what one of my users describes as "the blue screen that isn’t a bsod").

# re: The Reboot problem

Friday, September 15, 2006 5:19 PM by Nick

It's painful for us too.. the ILO and DRAC cards help, but can be a challange to get the customer on-board with. To help address this on the front side, we did devleop some QA testing and documentation procedures, and tied these into an in-house web-app for knowledge transfer and collaboration. More here... http://addicted-to-it.blogspot.com/2006/09/patching-reboot-problem.html

# re: The Reboot problem

Saturday, September 16, 2006 12:41 PM by Andy

I've been having major problems with servers not rebooting after pressing the "restart now" option after installing the patches for the past two sets of patch tuesdays. Fortunately I've been able to run shutdown.exe from another machine, but 45-90 minutes to reboot a server is ridiculous. - It's taken this long after waiting a reasonable amount for the first reboot to work and then getting a connection (somehow) to another machine to force a reboot.

# re: The Reboot problem

Saturday, September 16, 2006 7:42 PM by bradley

I've had issues with reboots. ILO board in every server is the way to go. Dedicated ILO subnets and LDAP (AD) based authentication/authorization as well.