[Durham] meeting tomorrow / advice on PXE utility please?

[Richard Mortimer]

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Hi Mark,

On 14/09/2015 16:35, mark wrote:
> 
> Also, can I ask a question for which I do not know the correct 
> search terms to put into an engine:
> 
> Say I have a pile of 25 old laptops which I want to audit (i.e.
> get some basic hardware information out of them into a
> spreadsheet).
The one tool I know of is 'lshw' that does a pretty good job of
probing a system.

> I'm sure there must be a tool to do this by connecting them all 
> (one at a time) to another machine using an ethernet X-over cable 
> (or 1GB/s port), booting each client machine to be audited from 
> that 2-node network, serving up a PXE payload from the managing 
> machine, reading the hardware info from the client and writing it 
> to a file.
I don't know of anything pre-canned but a quick look says that lshw is
present on the system rescue cd.

http://www.sysresccd.org/Detailed-packages-list

I'm not sure if it can be PXE booted but it certainly could be booted
from either USB or CDROM (I'd guess any laptop that is worth re-using
could probably boot off of either of those these days).

Update: I found the following which suggests you can use sysresccd via
PXE.
http://www.sysresccd.org/news/2008/02/10/manage-remote-servers-using-sys
temrescuecd/

As far as getting it off the machine I don't think it would be too
hard to let the laptop autoconfigure network and then just ssh the
data into a suitable capture program on a remote server i.e.

lshw | ssh me at server.example.org /home/me/savehwinfo.sh

The page I mention above has a link to a page about getting the PXE to
autorun. Some of the examples there are very similar to what you want
to do!

http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Run_your_own_scripts_with_a
utorun

A bit of scripting required but nothing too massive.

Richard

> 
> Can anyone point me to this tool please?
> 
> Cheers folks, Mark
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ Durham mailing
> list -   Durham at mailman.lug.org.uk 
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> 
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=/GLk
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