Admin Tip #1

This is the first of what I’m going to call my Admin Tip series, seeing I seem to have nothing better to blog about! The first utility is a little command called ‘at’ which I’m sure has been around since the beginning of time, but I only discovered it recently. It is a command which makes task scheduling quick and pain free, unlike the Scheduled Tasks control panel.

Before I discovered the tool, if one of my servers needed restarting, I would schedule in my head to do it in the evening, from home via remote desktop. However I would nearly always forget, and we would have to go another day with a flaky server. I didn’t bother with scheduled tasks because they take so long to create!

Enter ‘at’

No longer do I have to type the admin password a couple of times when creating the scheduled task. I just open up a command prompt, and type “at 5:00pm shutdown -r -f -t 0” – as simple as that!

It actually just creates a scheduled task which appears in your Tasks folder.

Go and have a play with it and let me know what you think. If you weren’t using this tool already, it will save you a couple of minutes every now and then, its so easy to use. Enjoy!