Well this is my first article in what I hope is going to be a series teaching you how to fight the good fight, digital office warfare.  In this article we are going to start out with the basics of offense because a good offense is … well a good offense.  Basic offense includes using built in tools (or easily downloadable power tools) to attack your neighbors whose computers you have admin privileges on.

Let’s get started, I hope you have read the Geneva Convention of office warfare. The first tool we are going to look at is shutdown.

Usage: shutdown [-i | -l | -s | -r | -a] [-f] [-m \\computername] [-t xx] [-c "c
omment"] [-d up:xx:yy]

No args                 Display this message (same as -?)
-i                      Display GUI interface, must be the first option
-l                      Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s                      Shutdown the computer
-r                      Shutdown and restart the computer
-a                      Abort a system shutdown
-m \\computername       Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort
-t xx                   Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
-c "comment"            Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters)
-f                      Forces running applications to close without war
ning
-d [u][p]:xx:yy         The reason code for the shutdown
u is the user code
p is a planned shutdown code
xx is the major reason code (positive integer le
ss than 256)
yy is the minor reason code (positive integer le
ss than 65536)

Shutdown has a fairly obvious use.  Basically using the parameters available to us we can shutdown the computers of those poor souls around us.  Here is the general use for that.

Shutdown /f /r /m \\enemycomp /t 30

So what are we doing here?  The first flag we see if /f.  This is force, what this means is that your coworkers apps will be closed forcefully if they don’t close nicely.   The second flag /r is reboot, you can also use /s which will shut the computer down and not start it back, this makes little difference.  The next flag is an important one /m. This is where we give the computer name of our target.  Syntax is /m \\computername. The final flag we show above is /t.  This flag is a way of throwing your coworkers a bone, it is the countdown timer.  If left out the shutdown happens right away but if you put it in they get a countdown timer first allowing them a little time to try to either save stuff or abort the shutdown if they know what they are doing (link to defense article).  The only other flag that you may be interested in at this point is /c.  /c allows you to add a comment to the shutdown timer dialog, this is mostly used to taunt your coworkers and the syntax is /c “Haha, I pwns ju kthxbye”. So all put together you can use a command like this to shutdown the imaginary computer dev-BobHunington giving Bob a 10 second chance to save his day with the taunting message “Don’t Mess With TESTERS BOB!” like this.

Shutdown /f /s /m \\dev-BobHunington  /t 10 /c “Don’t Mess With Me BOB!”

That is all we have for this week, go forth and reboot! Remember kids save your work, you never know if the person next to you is reading this same article right now.