How to fetch network card configs remotely from multiple Linux machines?

Question

I need a tool/script to fetch network card configurations from multiple Linux machines, mostly Red Had Enterprise 5. I only know some basic bash, and I need something that can be run remotely pulling server names from a CSV. It also needs to be be run quickly and easily by non-technical types from a Windows machine. I've found WBEM/CMI/SBLIM, but I'd rather not write a whole C++ application. Can anyone point me to a tool or script that could accomplish this?

Answer 1

Can you give more details as to what information you need to pull? The various parameters to ifconfig give quite a lot of information about a Linux machine's network card configuration, so if you can do it that way it will be very easy. Simply write a script that converts the CSV into something white-space delimited, and then you can do something like:

#!/bin/bash

for host in $HOSTS ; do
    CARDINFO=`ssh $host 'ifconfig'`
    # Do whatever processing you need on CARDINFO here
done

That's a very rough sketch of the pseudocode. You'll also need to set up passwordless SSH on the hosts you want to access, but that's easy to do on Red Hat.

Answer 2

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, you likely just need to take a copy of the files in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ from each server. You can use an sftp client to accomplish that over ssh.

(The files are just easy-to-read text config files containing the network device configuration)