[SOLVED] advice on distro and how to make it work (doesn't really fit in distro forum)

Hello all,
I am looking for a live cd/flash drive that I can use to boot up, with admin privileges, and allow lansweeper to pull the MAC address and serial number...obviously there can't be a firewall to block traffic.
This info would be saved in a csv file and used for inventory on new machines.
I can't do this with windows...is there a way to do this by booting from a live flash drive with a linux distro?
Thank you!

sounds like you want a linux live cd,
they are available from all the major linux vendors- suse, redhat, and others.
that is the linux operating system that is on cd, or flash drive, that you can boot that up and have a somewhat running system without a hard drive. only requirement i think is 1 or 2 GB of RAM.
whether "lansweeper" comes on the live distribution i don't know, and i don't know what else you need to do buy to get MAC addresses you would just do ifconfig which is a built in command in linux. and there's other built in commands to give you hardware information.

Thanks ron7000,
would I need to create an account in order to use the config command, or would I have automatically have administrator privileges and command line function without signing in as a particular user?

Lansweeper is not made for Linux...

Lansweeper server requirements: Windows 2003 or higher, Windows XP or higher (Windows server recommended) Dotnet framework 4.0 or higher. SQL server 2000 or higher or SQL Express (free) or SQL Compact (free) Lansweeper client requirements: Windows 2000 or higher. Windows home clients are only supported with Lspush scanning.

In Linux, you use

ifconfig -a

.

No special privileges are needed.

Use a solid distro like CentOS or openSUSE, and you'll have no problems.

usually you prepend "sudo" to the command you want to run with admin privs.
if that results in an error, try "su" as a sole command next.
if that results in an error, you have to boot straight into root console (= recovery mode).

keep in mind that you won't get any feedback (like ******) on entering passwords.

Excellent.
Does it seem feasible to run a script that would just grab that info and pipe it to a csv file. That way, no monitor would even be necessary, and I could just move on down the line quickly....
Just thinking out loud here.

So, I've given this a try, but ifconfig -a will give me the hardware address, but not the serial number. I've done a quick google search and come up with some sudo commands for that, but I was wondering if there was a way to pull the serial number without having to shift into administrative privileges?

What serial number?

the sn of the pc I am working on.

There is probably hundreds of them on any given PC, which one in particular are you looking for?

Thanks for everything, guys.
You pointed me to the answer.

dmidecode -t 1

That gives me exactly the info I need. Now I'll go work on a script to grab that info and file it away.
Thanks again!

Originally Posted by frequently absent I was wondering if there was a way to pull the serial number without having to shift into administrative privileges?

$ dmidecode -t 1 
# dmidecode 2.12
/dev/mem: Permission denied

it doesn't look like it would work without admin privs.
but maybe your system is different.

i'm still a little worried about that serial number nonsense.
have you, perchance, installed linux on a motorbike?

Originally Posted by frequently absent Thanks for everything, guys. You pointed me to the answer. dmidecode -t 1 That gives me exactly the info I need. Now I'll go work on a script to grab that info and file it away. Thanks again!

Maybe tee would help you out with that.