OT: gather hardware information over network

[Hiisi]

On 23 November 2011 19:19, Hiisi <hiisi at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Hi list!
> This maybe is a little off-topic on this list hence the 'OT' in the
> subject line. Sorry for that.
> I need to gather hardware information from computers on a local
> network and store it on a server. The server runs F16, clients run
> different ubuntu versions (11.04 mostly). The information should
> include such things as monitor serial numbers and other details for
> definite identification. The main purpose is inventarisation of all
> the hardware we have in the office. There's about 40 workstations.
> Google suggests use combination of OCS Inventory NG with GLPI [1]. The
> other idea is to write a set of bash scripts and put them on cron on
> workstations (the information should be updated weekly) and main
> script on the server would store information in the database. However
> if there's ready solution I would be happy to use it.
> Any tips?
> REFERENCES
> 1. http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/en/about/features/ocsng-glpi.html

Finally I ended up writing my own solution. On the client side there's
a bash script. It parses lshw output and looks in some other sources
(i.e. /proc/*). On the server side there's a php application that
receives data as json object, parses it using json_decode() and stores
it into MySQL database. Server application is written using
yii-framework. First attempt was to parse json-object produced
directly by lshw command (lshw -json). However this option does not
present on older lshw versions (prior to B.02.15). But the main
problem with json produced by lshw is that its structure (depth)
depends of hardware present on the machine. Hence constructing json
'by hand' I can be sure that its structure is the same on all examined
machines.
I think to open-source it all and upload to sourceforge or somewhere.
I know, there's many inventory systems. But mine is the right one - it
works only on linux ;-) Seriously, it has one more adventure - it
grabs monitor serial and model. Others system I saw on the net
doesn't.
-- 
Hiisi.
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