After our last post on gathering system demographics using PowerShell (specifically the Get-Object cmdlet) we had a few auditors mention to us that there are other ways to do it as well. We couldn’t agree more and we’re glad they brought it up. Microsoft seems to like to give us choices for how we perform job tasks, and this is no exception.
One other very popular way to gather information from a Microsoft Windows system is through the built-in systeminfo.exe utility. This command has been available at the command line since Microsoft Windows XP, and so in the course of an audit you’re very likely to find this command native on any Windows system you happen to be auditing.
One of the other nice things about this command is the fact that it is very, very simple to run. Simply type the name of the binary into a cmd.exe or powershell.exe terminal window and the tool will query information about the underlying system you’re examining.
There aren’t many options or command line switches that you can use to customize the output, but there are a few. Microsoft documents all of the options you do have at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491007.aspx. From that same article, here are the options that they make available to you:
[framed_box]/s Computer : Specifies the name or IP address of a remote computer (do not use backslashes). The default is the local computer.
/u Domain \ User : Runs the command with the account permissions of the user specified by User or Domain\User. The default is the permissions of the current logged on user on the computer issuing the command.
/p Password : Specifies the password of the user account that is specified in the /u parameter.
/fo { TABLE | LIST | CSV } : Specifies the format to use for the output. Valid values are TABLE, LIST, and CSV. The default format for output is LIST.
/nh : Suppresses column headers in the output. Valid when the /fo parameter is set to TABLE or CSV.
/? : Displays help at the command prompt[/framed_box]
So a few of the nice features you can see from the utility already is the ability to run the command against remote computers, the ability to specify the output format of the data (including CSV format), and even the ability to suppress the headers in a CSV file to make it easier to parse later.
So if you haven’t tried this utility as a part of your baselining efforts yet, we definitely would recommend that you check it out. It’s another one of those nice auditing goodies Microsoft has built into the operating system for us.