How To Remotely Shut Down Windows XP Computers From A Linux Server

As a budget cutback, our school administrators asked us to shutdown
all non-essential classroom computers at night to save electricity. I
teach Linux in a classroom that has a Dell Poweredge 2850 Red Hat
Enterprise Linux (RHEL5) server and 29 Dell Optiplex 745 student lab
computers running Microsoft Windows XP SP3 as the host operating system
and VMWare Server to provide virtual Linux machines for our classes. I
researched on the Internet for the best solution to remotely shutdown
the student lab computers at night. I was not able to find one post or
how-to that completely answered my questions, but I was able to piece
together a solution. In an effort to document this project and help
others with similar needs, here are my notes on the project.

. Read the rest at howtoforge.net.