If you’ve ever wanted to remotely reboot a Windows box from your machine, the following tip can be useful…

Any Macintosh OS X system can reboot a windows machine, assuming that you know the credentials of an Administrative Account on the Windows system.  Open the Terminal and use the following command line:

net rpc shutdown -I IPADDRESS -U USERNAME%PASSWORD

If you omit the password section, you’ll be prompted for the password—which might be more secure if you are worried about somebody looking through your terminal history. You can add the -f parameter to force a shutdown, which might be necessary to make sure the remote machine actually shuts down.

Now several factors may influence whether this technique actually works— Firewalls, Routers and Gateways may prevent this from working…  But in my informal testing, I have not seen a situation where this doesn’t work.