Here in lies the problem. Our network security officer will not allow ssh as root. Also, we have many "flavors" of unix/linux which have different shutdown options. I tried something like this but it does not work on all the servers. (They do not like the <<\EOT...EOT construct)
$1 is list of remote servers. mbaker has sudo root privilege

cat $1 | while read X
do
echo "Starting shutdown of $X"
ssh -T ${X} << \EOT >> Emergency_shutdown.log 2>> error.log
name=`uname -n`
echo "name = $name"
type=`uname -a | awk '{print $1}'`
echo "type = $type"
if [ "$type" = "SunOS" ]
then
echo "Emergency shutdown initiated for $name."
# sudo -u root shutdown -y -i5 -g0 "Emergency shutdown started!!!!!" &
fi
if [ "$type" = "Linux" ]
then
echo "Emergency shutdown initiated for $name."
sudo -u root /sbin/shutdown -k now "This is just a test. Not really re-booting." < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
fi
EOT
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
echo "Host $X connect failed."
fi
done
exit 0