No system is an island - Using Windows And Tech Step By Step

The 3 essential phases every system administrator goes through :

Reflect
Repent
Reboot

This is the Taoism of systems admin :

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Quite true when you have Windows boxes to take care of,and even more true when you in some form of mental state apply GPOs that you should not have applied in the first place.
The place where I was previously working,I saw the 3Rs in action.Here is the story for all those who are interested,others can reboot their systems.

It was 3 AM and got a call from production floor that user boxes (all Windows)were stuck...cant seem to do any damn thing.Same for other departments.Didnt take a genius to figure out what had happened.
Most of the folks kept their stuff on network shares on a file and print server and...the server rebooted(Windows 2000 server,3AM....getting something here?)
Apparently it was set to download and restart after updates were applied automatically.
Next day,when the fun had died down,some folks realised that the GPO for server should not have been modified(reflect and repent).
It was an interesting night though-paging everyone and getting calls from them as early as 6AM.

For people who are as lazy as I am,you can reboot or shutdown any windows box using the shutdown command in windows.Checkout various switches :shutdown/?

Personally,I reboot my box using :
shutdown -r -t 0 (this will restart it immediately).
Put it in a batch file and have fun...especially if you use psexec and run this on a remote console.

Sorry for the long story on 3Rs,I thought this was applicable to all areas of systems administration.
Will write something more sensible in my next post when I get the mood to do so.

Peace.