grab dell asset tag from bios

plunger has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Gracious monks,
For those who don't deal with Dell, I'll start by explaining that Dell puts an "asset tag" on all of their machines. You can find this tag several places on the outside of the case as well as tucked away neatly in the BIOS. We use this for tracking desktops through out our company.

I have come a cross a vbScript that takes a hostname and queries it for it's asset tag number. Incredibly useful, unfortunately it is not perl and it only takes a single host name at a time, through a dialog box. Great for a quick checkup, bad for tracking fifty or so machines.

My Point
Does anyone know of a way to gather info from the bios (in particular, the asset tag recorded there)?

Thanks,
-p

Comment on grab dell asset tag from bios

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Re: grab dell asset tag from bios by sweetblood (Prior) on Feb 16, 2005 at 19:38 UTC
Have a look at this link from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/Perl/hardware/basic/hwbape01.mspx The script listed will return a bunch of Bios info, including the serial number which matches my Dell service tag. Good Luck Sweetblood	[reply]
Re: grab dell asset tag from bios by zentara (Cardinal) on Feb 16, 2005 at 19:24 UTC
I saw this trick with dd mentioned before on the usenet. Maybe there is a perl equivalent? `# On an x86, the BIOS is traditionally accessible in the # last 64K of the first megabyte of # memory. So, start at byte 0 of RAM. Skip 992K. # Read 32K and dump it to stdout." dd if=/dev/mem bs=32k skip=31 count=1 \| strings -n 10 \| grep -i 'asser +t tag'` [download] I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh	[reply] [d/l]
Re: grab dell asset tag from bios by CountZero (Bishop) on Feb 16, 2005 at 20:09 UTC
To get all this data (and more) out of Windows computers you can let the Scriptomatic Engine write the program for you. The new version even allows remote access to other computers. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re: grab dell asset tag from bios by plunger (Initiate) on Feb 16, 2005 at 21:15 UTC
All incredibly helpful. Thanks folks. Sweetblood, the ms link pretty well handles it. And the dd solution might just handle the *nix boxes we keep around. Ever grateful, -the big suck-	[reply]