Take it a step further???
So today, Susan mentioned a nice little scenerio to reboot her desktop, while away from the office. So let's take that idea abit further. Call your local SBSC or managed services provider and tell them, "Hey, I gotta have this!!!" Well hopefully, if they are worth their salt and know you and your business it's already being done. alot of Management systems now allow for system, service and even application availablity. Don't look now, but Windows can do sometimes natively. If you have a service that HAS to be running, goto start->run->services.msc wait for the services management console to open, then select your 'Mission Critical' service. Then click Action->Properties. In the resulting dialog, Click on 'Recovery' Tab, low and behold there's 4 options for 1st, 2nd and Subsequent failures:
- Take no action
- Restart The Service
- Run a program
- Reboot the machine.
Now consult your local professional before setting these, adn be sure to know and understand the consequences of each. This is a great option, that few people exploit. Let's consider for a moment the run application. That can be an alert or 'open a help desk ticket' or 'Beep Alice' If she gets service in Wonderland. Really kool stuff. Watch out though that when an actual reboot does occur that application event log's gonna fill up aweful quick.
Now on the other hand, hopefully your SBSC/Partner has already settup the monitoring native to SBS or setup an alternative, integrated monitoring solution. If they have not WE NEED TO TALK!!!
So let's bring this full circle, after my little monitoring and services tangent...Hopefully there is some level of node level monitoring, especially, in Susan's case, when she's werkin remotely, she can setup a monitoring system that will, perhaps look for a service availability on the desktop in question, if it ain't available, perhaps open a helpdesk ticket, issue the command to reboot the machine, update the ticket with the results, take it from there....Before you say Enterprise solution, the tools are available inside SBS to do ALL THAT. The only thing missing is a SBSC/Partner to implement it and tie the pieces together...
-bill