Remotely Kill Process on a Windows Server

Ran into a problem today where I needed to kill a process on a server that I didn’t have remote KVM access to and couldn’t RDP into. This particular machine had only VNC and the VNC service was hung. 

Windows Server includes two commands tasklist and taskkill that allow you to remotely list the processes running on a machine and then kill these processes.

Viewing Tasks on Remote Computer

To view the processes just use the command:

tasklist.exe /S SYSTEM /U USERNAME /P PASSWORD

Killing Tasks on Remote Computer

Once you have the PID of a process you can execute

taskkill.exe /S SYSTEM /U USERNAME /P PASSWORD /PID PID_NUMBER

I found this great tool by googling it and finding the watching the net blog article on it, there’s more information on their blog (along with a ton of google adsense ads..).