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I am looking for something similar to what is posted in this question: Linux + get the all information about the hardware from machine by tool or script

Basically - I want to be able to plug in a USB device to a computer, boot to it, and have it pull various information about the computer:

  • Hardware
    • Ram
    • Video Card
    • Hard Drive
      • Disk Usage
    • Processor

and probably other things that aren't coming to mind.

I am aware there are solutions like Spice Works, but I am looking for a hardware solution. I basically have a pile of computers that need to be upgraded to a certain standard (ram, cpu, video card, etc.). I think it would be easiest to plug in a USB device, boot to it, have the script run, the script result gets saved to the USB device, and then the machine powers off. Then I put the device in the next machine and keep going.

Does anything like this exist? Am I stuck creating something myself using a Linux bootable environment?

Thanks in advance!

Community
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Origin
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  • I would suggest a PXE boot solution instead of a USB drive; far easier to deploy & automate. – Andrew Jan 27 '12 at 06:32
  • This is an interesting concept. I hadn't thought of this. The issue is that the BIOS settings have PXE disabled. I only plan to do this exercise once - so I figured pressing a key to manually boot to a USB would be the simplest way. – Origin Jan 27 '12 at 06:59

2 Answers2

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I don't think this is what he wants He wants to be able to boot the computer, probably without the need of the OS and have it load an application that can output hardware information.

The closes I've come up with is HDT (hardware detection tool) but this requires the use of PXE. When it works though it can dump the hardware into a file that is JSON encoded which can then be parsed into a script. The problem with this solution is that it requires a working TFTP server running pxelinux, you need access to the pxe server to gain access to the dump files and you need to create a script to parse the data.

Ideally what is needed is a bootable application that can load from USB and can write the data on the usb key which can then be loaded up somewhere to parse the data.

Open-audit is a network scan software that requires that the system runs the agent. which means you need to boot the server with an OS and install an agent, then setup a server somewhere to host the scanner. Not quite what he is looking for.

evilstrike
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You could copy the Open-AudIT linux script onto a USB stick and have it output to a text file.

Caveat - I'm the developer...

http://www.open-audit.org

Mark Unwin
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