Is there a way to check a computer's specifications, and print the results with PXE booting?

So at work, we check computer's specifications, and need to print these in a standard format. I know how to set up a PXE server already, but I was wondering if it were easy to get a program (or write a script) that will check the computer's hardware (processor, memory, hard drive), and print it over the network.

My thoughts are that I can boot a very simple linux os over PXE, and run a script to do the dirty work. However, I'm not sure how to set it up to use a network printer, or which script to use for that matter.

All the co开发者_开发知识库mputers have the same architecture, (x86), so a single implementation should work for all of them.

I would be inclined to avoid using a printer directly here and use something like scp or netcat to send back the information you discover.

Edit: There are a number of tools that might help collecting the data itself, depending on what exactly you want to collect. I've found dmidecode to be very useful. Potientally it can tell you the version of the BIOS, memory stick size/speed/locations and quite a lot of very detailed information. It is buggy on some older hardware with broken DMI tables though. lshal, lshw, lspci and lsusb are all fairly common on linux installations and rather useful for these things.

Have a look at GLPI. It's a good open source software used to manage IT tickets, but, it also integrates a IT infrastructure management that could turn our to be useful in your case.

There is a small piece of software to be installed on each remote client (this could be done remotely and silently) and then you can collect a lot of information and match it by IP addresses

We use 'pdsh' to manage our global network. We have a naming convention of hosts that makes the host expression easy to write. So to continue the ls### suggestion to collect the info on a collection of hardware, we would write a command like this:

[root@admin-console ~]# pdsh -R exec -w china-[1-1024] ssh %h lshal > china-lshal-cabinet-01.log

pdsh prefixes the host name to the output lines and as it runs as a concurrent operator the lines will collate. A simple sorting script using the, say "china-[1-1024]:" tag is needed to get them organized. You could also make the pdsh run sequentially by limiting its concurrency but if you are running large configurations you would want the concurrency.