SUMMARY: query tools

From: eddy keller {74156} (eddy@swl.msd.ray.com)
Date: Mon Apr 13 1998 - 13:33:47 CDT


I am rather late on this summary primarily due to finishing up my
inventory. I asked the following:

> Before I go about reinventing the wheel I wanted some input from the
> group. I have a rather agressive deadline for doing system inventories on
> a large number of Unix servers and workstations (detailing OS, network,
> and installed software) and want to capture as much of this information
> progamatically as possible. The OS's vary from Solaris 2.6 down to SunOS
> 4.1.3. I am looking for a tool that I can launch from one host which will
> go to the various hosts, gather the information, and return it into a
> file which I can then use in various ways. Given the size of the host
> base I want to utilize the standard system tools (dmesg, sysdef, uname, arp, etc)
> to gather the info (as opposed to compiling or installing specific
> programs locally on each of the queried hosts - e.g. sysinfo).
> I have begun a script in perl and will be happy to share if I end up
> writing it m'self but given the breadth of this group I am sure others
> have faced similar tasks.

Many solutions were offered (list of those who replied at the bottom) and
I do appreciate all those who took the time to reply. Probably the best
"out of the box" solution was Sun's "whatami.sh" script found at
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/sun-info/sun-faq/Utils/. Aside from some really
good home-grown scripts I received, I also got pointers to the following:
http://www.iti.qc.ca/users/sean/bb-dnld/

I ended up writing something myself since I actually have more than Sun's on my
network (not really mentioned in my earlier post because, hey, this is a Sun forum). I
also bit the bullet and used sysinfo. While we do have a mixture of OS's
in our network we heavily automount application binaries so I only had to
make sure I had a couple of OS specific versions available.
So basically my perl script reads from a list of hosts (which I glean
from our netgroup file), rsh's to the host and uses: uname, dmesg (or uerf
in the case of Ultrix hosts), looks to see if a sysinfo was available and,
 if so, uses it. If the ethernet address(es) still weren't available arp
is brought in. A resulting file is created which can be used to read
into a database or, with the help of another program, used to print out in
a more readable format. It gathers most of the information I needed.
I didn't get to the point where I gathered information regarding
applications as my requirements changed but adding that would have been
possible.
It is rather large so I am not posting it in this but should any of you
want this I would be happy to send you a copy. There are no doubt more
efficient ways in perl to do what I did.
Again many thanks to those who sent me pointers, help and suggestions.
The list of brave souls is:

Daniel Dunn <dunn@sled.gsfc.nasa.gov>
john@mlb.semi.harris.com (John M. Blasik)
 Michael Hill <Michael_Hill@csgsystems.com>
 David Thorburn-Gundlach <david@bae.uga.edu>
 Peter Polasek <pete@cobra.brass.com>
 Chris Marble <cmarble@orion.ac.hmc.edu>
 James Harmon <jharmon@telecnnct.com>
 Richard Hellier <rlh@lsil.com>
 David Harte <david.harte@hos.horizon.ie>
 anders@hmi.de (Thomas Anders)
 celeste@celestial.stokely.com (Celeste Stokely)
 Ed Finch <efinch@eos.hitc.com>
 Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
 Ju-Lien Lim <julienlim@rocketmail.com>
 Mike Salehi <mrs@cadem.mc.xerox.com>

*******************************************************************************
  eddy keller email : eddy@swl.msd.ray.com
  Raytheon Electronic Systems M/S: T3MN35 voice : (978) 858-5057
  50 Apple Hill Drive, Tewksbury, MA 01876 fax : (978) 858-4336
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