

To find all servers that need a reboot, I look for the presence of the following registry key: (I would think you would want to do testing, and the like, prior to pushing out the updates and use System Center or WSUS.) Find servers that need a reboot I am not certain about the wisdom of turning on auto update for 1,000 servers. I have been looking forward to this event for weeks now ever since the Scripting Wife asked me to be on the show (she does all their scheduling). It will be awesome, and it is a lot of fun. Well, tomorrow February 21, 2013, at 9:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, I will be on the PowerScripting Podcast with Hal and Jon. Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. I am hoping you can come up with something that does not entail logging on to 1,000 servers and looking for reboot messages that may pop up (that was Falstaff’s idea-“hey, you can use RDP and not have to physically go to the box,” he said).

I have looked around at several WMI classes, and searched the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog, but to no avail. So he “challenged” me (a euphuism for telling me to do it) to write a script that would detect any server on the network that needed to be rebooted following installation of hotfixes. No one knows how long the server was in that state. When he recently logged on to a server console (don’t ask me why my boss was actually logging on to the console of a server), a message popped up that stated the server needed to reboot to complete installing updates. Hey, Scripting Guy! My boss is a Falstaff sort of character, but every once in a while he does actually have a good idea. Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, talks about using Windows PowerShell to find servers that need to be rebooted.
