Powershell launch at specific times

Question

I am building a system to restart computers for patch purposes. Most of the skeleton is there and working, I use workflows and some functions to allow me to capture errors and reboot the systems in a number of ways in case of failures.

One thing I am not sure of is how to set up the timing. I am working on a web interface where people can schedule their reboots, either dynamic (one-time) or regularly scheduled (monthly). The server info and times for the boots is stored in a SQL database.

The part that I am missing is how to trigger the reboots when scheduled. All I can think of is allowing for whole hour increments, and run a script hourly checking to see if any servers in the db have a reboot time that "matches" the current time. This will likely work, but is somewhat inflexible.

Can anyone think of a better way? Some sort of daemon?

For instance, user X has 300 servers assigned to him. He wants 200 rebooted at 10 PM on each Friday, and 50 once a month on Saturday at 11 PM. There will be over a dozen users rebooting 3000-4000 computers, sometimes multiple times monthly.

Answer 1

Ok, let's say you have a script that takes a date and time as an argument that will look up what computers to reboot based on that specific date and time, or schedule, or whatever it is that you're storing in your sql db that specifies how often to reboot things. For the sake of me not really knowing sql that well, we'll pretend that this is functional (would require the PowerShell Community Extensions snapin for Invoke-AdoCommand cmdlet):

[cmdletbinding()]
Param([string]$RebootTime)

$ConStr = 'Data Source=SQLSrv01;Database=RebootTracking;Integrated Security=true;'
$Query = "Select * from Table1 Where Schedule = $RebootTime"
$Data = Invoke-AdoCommand -ProviderName SqlClient -ConnectionString $ConStr -CommandText $Query
$data | ForEach{Do things to shutdown $_.ServerName}

You said you already have things setup to reboot the servers so I didn't even really try there. Then all you have to do is setup a scheduledjob for whenever any server is supposed to be rebooted:

Register-ScheduledJob –FilePath \\Srv01\Scripts\RebootServers.ps1 –Trigger @{Frequency=Weekly; At="10:00PM"; DaysOfWeek="Saturday"; Interval=4} -ArgumentList @{'RebootTime'="Day=Saturday;Weeks=4;Time=22:00"}

That's an example, but you know, you could probably work with it to accomplish your needs. That will run it once every 4 Saturdays (about monthly). That one scheduled task will query the sql server to match up a string against a field, and really you could format that any way you want to make it as specific or general as desired for the match. That way one task could reboot those 200 servers, and another could reboot the other 50 all dependent on the user's desires.