How to remotely Shutdown or Reboot a Windows PC from LAN or VPN

Did you know that we can issue a shutdown and/or reboot of a Windows PC from any other LAN-connected Windows machine? The only two things we need to do that are the following:

An administrative account (local or domain) valid for the PC you want to reboot
The feature "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer" (from Control Panel > System > Remote Desktop Settings) active for that user (or for all users).

If we got these two things, we can force a remote shutdown by following the steps below. For convenience, let's call LOCAL PC the machine we want to use to issue the shutdown/reboot command from, and REMOTE PC the machine which we want to shutdown.

Create a new account on the LOCAL PC with the same username and password of the REMOTE PC elevated account's credentials.
Open an elevated Command Prompt from the LOCAL PC and issue the following command, replacing <secs> with the number of seconds to wait before activating the shudown/reboot process - any value between 0 to 315360000 - and <ip> with the REMOTE PC IP address or hostname.

To issue a Shutdown

shutdown /f /t <secs> /m \\<ip> -c "This PC will shutdown in <xx> seconds"

1	shutdown /f /t <secs> /m \\<ip> -c "This PC will shutdown in <xx> seconds"

To issue a Reboot

shutdown /r /f /t <secs> /m \\<ip> -c "This PC will reboot in <xx> seconds"

1	shutdown /r /f /t <secs> /m \\<ip> -c "This PC will reboot in <xx> seconds"

That's about it! Now we know what to do when you know that our server is up and running but wq cannot access it through Remote Desktop and/or TeamViewer anymore.