remotewindows-explorer
I'm having big troubles with a remote server that for some reason explorer.exe crashed and, although I didn't lose remote desktop connectivity, I can't do anything. Is there a way of restarting explorer without rebooting the server?
I appreciate ANY suggestions!!
Does your server have multiple NIC's installed? We ran into a behavior that occurs on some servers where the server gets rebooted but you cannot connect via RDP, but it doesn't happen every time.
We finally tracked it down to an obscure bug (IMHO) where having the RDP bound to all interfaces (which is the default) can cause the behavior. Fortunately, the first server we had that happen on had a DRAC which allowed us to correct the problem remotely. The second one did not.
The solution was to explicity bind RDP to the interface it was suppose to be using. Since then we haven't had a problem. In the case of our second server we were able to issue a reboot command from another machine on the network and when it came back up we were able to connect and fix the issue. The command was:
shutdown /r /f /t 000 /m \\<servername>
or you can use this command to show the GUI for it
shutdown /i
What sort of tuning are we talking about here?
Perhaps the best idea would be for both of you to read a book such as "High Performance MySQL" and TOGETHER plan the best strategy.
Doing it remotely is definitely not the most efficient way of doing things but its not totally impossible if you have decent cooperation on the other end.
I think the real key here is going to be for both of you to be on the "same team".
A "slow to respond" sysadmin is also not the most fun to work with. Perhaps you guys can schedule some phone time and go over a general battle plan... then fine tune it from there?
Sorry to sound vague and general but that's the best I can do with the details of your question.
Hope this helps.
Best Answer
Explorer runs on a per-user basis. Can you log in under a different account that isn't already logged in?
Edit: Also, if your remote desktop session is still active, CTRL + ALT + END should have the same effect as a CTRL + ALT + DEL on the remote system. That might get you the Task Manager up, in which case you can kill/restart explorer.exe as required.