Network Bootable diagnostic testing?

R

Red-Rx7

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Sep 19, 2008
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Hello,

I am looking for a product that can perform PC diagnostics (full system) on multiple machines without an OS (self boot-able). My thought would be an Ethernet based diagnostics system, whereas I could simply plug in the power supply and Ethernet cable to a bunch of machines and perform diagnostics on each one accordingly; with all the data collected and stored in a system of some sorts.

Does this exist?

I have seen various software and hardware systems to individually test a machine, but I need to do multiples at a time. So the individual POST or USB Boot-able diagnostics won't work for what I need. I don't want to have to plug in monitors, keyboards, mice, and boot off a disk per machine. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
 
I don't exactly understand. Here's what I know:

a) You have multiple machines you want to test simultaneously
b) You want to do some diagnostics on them, without input devices or a monitor
c) Since these computers have no OS and hooking anything up to them independently is undesirable, it has to be some kind of network bootable tool

What do you mean by "full system" diagnostics? Are you talking about some kind of penetration testing, or scanning hardware for problems? Specifically, what are you trying to test?

Being able to boot a specific OS or software on any computer over a network (at will) sounds like it would be a fairly serious security hole. Based upon your requirements, couldn't someone technically run a similar tool on a remote computer over the Internet? If so, I seriously doubt the existence of such a tool.
 
LucidDream,

Thanks for the reply!

Essentially, these machines are in an "unknown" state. They could be perfect, or they could have a stick of bad ram, or completely DoA. The testing I am looking for is diagnostics to detail if ther are any problems with Memory, HD, Motherboard, CPU, NiC, USB, Video Card, etc.

I have spent a few hours googling; but my google skills have failed me on this one. Like I have mentioned, I have seen hardware devices like this:

http://www.rst.com/rst-usb.shtml

This is a thumb drive that a computer can boot off of. It will run a battery of tests. But this is an individual one-by-one setup. I need to do 50+ at a time. I have tried to email these people, but they are not very helpful. I was hoping that something out there existed where this could be done from a push system via Ethernet.

Thanks!
 
PXEKnife seems to do this: http://pxeknife.erebor.org/ although I still don't think it's automated testing, not sure if that's what you're looking for. Probably not that difficult to dig into it and script some automation. I guess with some ingenuity (and tools that return their results in a scriptable way) you could probably script it enough that it would aggregate all the test results into a text file based on the MAC address or something and TFTP it back to the server. Some development on your part needed there though...

I've actually been looking for something similar myself for some time, but haven't had a chance to try out PXEKnife. Obviously you need an existing PXE-capable setup to deploy it, but that's not that hard (DHCP + TFTP). You still need a KVM at each machine though, whether that's physical or just a bunch of KVM ports.
 
Thanks for the response Keenan. I looked at the PXE setup; but I was hoping for something more out-of-the-box "professional" setup.

I am not sure why this moved to Networking and Security; as the testing I am wanting to do has nothing to do with Anti-Virus and Networking is the only thought of how to do it... As the intended purpose is that I need a solution to provide hardware diagnostics on complete machines in major bulks. I just figured the best way to do that would be through a network suite.

Thanks.
 
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