Question

What’s the easiest programmatic way to restart a service on a remote Windows system? Language or method doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t require human interaction.

Answer 1

As of Windows XP, you can use sc.exe to interact with local and remote services. Schedule a task to run a batch file similar to this:

 sc \\server stop service sc \\server start service 

Make sure the task runs under a user account privileged on the target server.

psservice.exe from the Sysinternals PSTools would also be doing the job:

 psservice \\server restart service