If you understand the title, you possibly already have a solution. If you don’t, then go take a trip to this link and get a copy of RSM. It is a nice little utility which runs as a service and listens on port 40 for Telnet connections. Once connected, you can stop and start services or bounce the machine. I occasionally cannot get onto a server or desktop remotely and just need to bounce Logmein, VNC or RDP and this utility is a wonderful, simple, just-does-what-it-says solution.
But if you run Vista as I do, your Telnet command has disappeared. Rather than walk you through going into Programs and Features and clicking on the Turn Windows Features on or off, I’ll point you at this very erudite article.
Besides the work going on to replace/modernise our kitchen, I’ve recently built a spare server (“Goblin”) in case this one (“Pixie”) breaks and played around with MySQL import and export to transfer the content. It works but I need to really find a decent auto-backup solution. Ideally one that can dump the backups to a NAS – mainly because I don’t want my “spare” server running constantly. It is basically a “park in the corner until I need it” machine. So the NAS box is on the Christmas list.
