Remote Shutdown without (!) RPC Service

Question

There are different ways of shutting down a computer remotely.

Here are three I know of:

1. Invoking the Shutdown method of the Win32_OperatingSystem class through a remote WMI connection
2. Using the Microsoft Windows shutdown.exe
3. Letting your (whatever).exe copy itself to the systemfolder on the target machine, register itself as a service and start it remotely with parameters so that it initiates a local shutdown.

Number 3 is why sysinternals does, e.g. However, it requires that you have file & printer sharing active so that it is able to copy itself to the target and invoke the service.

Number 2 works almost everywhere... but also needs to have file & printer sharing being enabled. Because: This activates the RPC service which is needed for remotely invoking the shutdown.

As far as I can tell, even Number 1, the WMI solution, not only needs WMI installed on the target, but also the RPC service enabled.

My problem is: I need a solution that allows me to shutdown a remote computer without RPC being enabled on it.

Is there a way?

Note: A way within a context of a business solution ;-)

Answer 1

I believe that you can use IPMI for such tasks. It requires hardware support though. We used it for lights-out management over a serial port in a solution a few years ago. We had some issues with the hardware support for soft shutdown since it requires some integration with the OS. From what I remember, you can mimic the hardware reaction to pressing the power button using a network packet sent by an IPMI utility. HTH.