Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[User Freebsd]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Antony Mawer wrote:

> Agreed...
>
> I could probably add around 1,500 systems that could conceivably be setup to 
> chime in with their numbers periodically; one of the pre-requisites for that 
> would be that the access method be HTTP or HTTPS based so it could be relayed 
> via a proxy...
>
> Another nice thing to include might be a hash of hardware inventory (a 
> further opt-in thing beyond the basic checkins)... Mark alluded to this early 
> in the piece, but it would be nice to be able to pull up something that said 
> "hang on, out of the X% of users on file, Y% are using Adaptec SCSI cards, in 
> particular model XYZ"... this would be very helpful when trying to get vendor 
> support etc...
>
> Some form of hash calculated on these would allow you to detect if they had 
> changed at all, and only re-send them in the event of a change...
>
> ... just thinking out loud ... !

'k, so, how do we script this then?

Getting a list of devices is actually pretty easy, and I've tried this on 
my 4.x machines also, so it isn't something that will be a problem on 
older versions:

# pciconf -l
chip0 at pci0:0:0: class=0x060000 card=0x00000000 chip=0x700c1022 rev=0x20 hdr=0x00
pcib1 at pci0:1:0: class=0x060400 card=0x00000000 chip=0x700d1022 rev=0x00 hdr=0x01
isab0 at pci0:7:0: class=0x060100 card=0x00000000 chip=0x74401022 rev=0x05 hdr=0x00
none0 at pci0:7:1: class=0x01018a card=0x74411022 chip=0x74411022 rev=0x04 hdr=0x00
chip1 at pci0:7:3: class=0x068000 card=0x74431022 chip=0x74431022 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
asr0 at pci0:9:0:  class=0x010400 card=0xc0351044 chip=0xa5111044 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
none1 at pci0:11:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x10018086 chip=0x100f8086 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
pcib2 at pci0:16:0:        class=0x060400 card=0x00000000 chip=0x74481022 rev=0x05 hdr=0x01
none2 at pci2:0:0: class=0x0c0310 card=0x74491022 chip=0x74491022 rev=0x07 hdr=0x00
none3 at pci2:7:0: class=0x030000 card=0x80081002 chip=0x47521002 rev=0x27 hdr=0x00
fxp0 at pci2:8:0:  class=0x020000 card=0x10408086 chip=0x12298086 rev=0x10 hdr=0x00

And, more specifically, we can get:

# pciconf -l -v
asr0 at pci0:9:0:  class=0x010400 card=0xc0351044 chip=0xa5111044 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
     vendor   = 'Adaptec (Formerly: Distributed Processing Technology (DPT))'
     device   = 'Raptor SmartRAID Controller'
     class    = mass storage
     subclass = RAID

So, with that one command, we can get a fair amount of hardware 
information ... but, how to feed that into a proper HTTP request? 
Storing all of that information would be cool, cause then we could build 
reports based on device driver / vendor / device / class and subclass ... 
but that might be a bit heavy to do in an HTTP request, no?  I take it 
email isn't an option, in your case?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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