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I have a server machine that I don't have physical access to at the moment. I needed to do a restart so I remote connected to the server and hit restart... it's been down a while.
If I try and remote connect again I am not able to as it is currently in either a shutdown, powered off, or start up state.
My question: is there any method to remotely check the current restart state? For example, I am looking to know if it's still shutting down, or if it's past that point and is starting back up again.
As a side note, I was pinging the server during the process, and I did get "unreachable" which was eventually followed by a reply. So my assumption is that it did shutdown and is currently starting back up again. As a bonus it would be useful to know what the delay is, for example if it's doing windows update configuration.
musefan
Posted 2016-01-22T12:32:35.333
Reputation: 165
1I always use
PING -t <IPAddress>... You will start that from a different machine before the restart the server, and you'll see it timeout and then come back up. You can also look in the event viewer as well and there will be logs in there indicating it restarted. – Pimp Juice IT – 2016-01-22T12:37:05.453So you think the fact i had unreachable for a bit, and then i'm back to getting a ping reply is certain that it's currently on startup? – musefan – 2016-01-22T12:38:36.820
1That's why you need iDRAC on a production server especially on remote machines – pulsarjune – 2016-01-22T12:38:58.813
1If you're having trouble connecting to this REMOTE ONLY machine then hopefully you have someone else on the other side to confirm if it had a reboot issue where it's on a screen before WIndows boots--this is a downside to restarting remotely with no physical access but a KVM over IP switch would be nice to see the screen regardless if Windows boots or not. We have KVM over IP switch in our data centers for these sort of issues although it is physically access both local datacenter and remote DR hot site. Otherwise the Event Viewer will have logs indicating that it indeed restarted. – Pimp Juice IT – 2016-01-22T12:41:46.090
1Note that the IP stack starts before most services in windows, so you will get ping responses as the system comes back up, but before the system will respond to remote access utilities. This is normal. There is no good way to tell the boot state of a physical system without low level remote access like ilo/idrac/ikvm/etc. I do the same thing you describe with ping, and make the same assumptions you do; theres not a lot more you can do without implementing technology specific to this purpose. – Frank Thomas – 2016-01-22T12:52:46.117
1Thanks for the advice guys, looks like im stuck with wait and see. Just for some extra info, our IT guys are out onsite today and the place they are at has very limited internet connectivity (so they are as good as useless). Our servers are behind locked doors that I cannot access (hence remote access only for now). BTW if somebody wants to write an answer about idrac (etc.) suggestions then that would probably satisfy my question – musefan – 2016-01-22T13:03:05.323
1There are services which you can setup which can report the online or offline status of a server. There is always a limitation in that even with the service, which could crash or be stopped for some reason, that you the servers gets into an unrecoverable state. Which is the reason features like turning on your machine on LAN activity is a thing. But you can't cover ever possible case, so sometimes, it literally takes a body to check. – Ramhound – 2016-01-22T13:28:07.220