Those of us who live in South Africa and are currently experiencing Blackouts ..ehh…I mean “Previously-lit areas” to be politically correct.

 

This means that our power supply gets purposefully cut every week (in my city three times a week for 2 hours each time - nice..).

 

No matter how good your UPS is, this is still a nightmare on servers and computers.

 

Now, I don’t wan to sound over paranoid here, but the risk of losing my Exchange store because my dear government decided to cut the power slightly earlier then “scheduled” is just a risk that I am not willing to take !

 

So what do you do ? (besides of course running back to the office each time to manually shutting down the servers each time)

 

What I have done, is simply informed my server to shutdown properly 30 minutes before the due time.

 

How ?

 

• Simply open up Task Scheduler (that comes with Windows of all flavours)
• Create a New Scheduled Task
• At the point of being asked which application to run, click on the Browse button and go to the c:\Windows\system32\Shutdown.exe file and click on OK.
• Set the task to active at any time you wish (you can at this point enter multiple Times and different days)
• Call it something exciting like Power shedding
• Click on Finish to complete
• Important: Right click on the Task and choose Properties
• You will see a line that says: RUN: c:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe
• You need to put in there after the .exe /s
• So the line will now read: c:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe /s
• Click on OK and you are done.

To Test it, Right-Click on the Task and click on RUN which will now shutdown the server.

 

Bonus Tip – how to automatically switch it back on now that it is shut down ?

Go into the server’s BIOS and under the Power setting enable the option that says Boot up on Power.

Seen as there are many BIOS you will need to have a play and find the option that suits your computer.

 

Good luck and may we all survive this nightmare !

 

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