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 Hat 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

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)

Answer 2

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 3

If you want to use WBEM/CIM for that (as mentioned in your original question), and you prefer a scripting environment over a programming language such as C/C++/Java, then there are PyWBEM and PowerCIM as two ways to do that in Python. If it needs to be bash etc, then there are command line clients (such as cimcli from the OpenPegasus project or wbemcli from the SBLIM project) and you could parse their output. Personally, I would prefer a Python based approach using PyWBEM. It is very easy to use, connecting to a CIM server is one line and enumerating CIM instances of a class is one more line.

On the side of the Linux system you want to query, the CIM server would need to run (tog-pegasus or sfcb) along with the right CIM provider packages (sblim). This approach has the advantage that your interface will be the same regardless of which Linux distribution you are using. Parsing config files is often dependent on the type of Linux distribution and I have seen them change across versions.

One main purpose of CIM is to provide reliable interfaces that are consistent across different types of environments and that change only compatibly over time.

Last but not least, using CIM allows you to get away without having to install any agent software on the system you want to inspect (as long as you can ensure that the CIM server is running).

Andy