I am relatively new to coding and to ruby.

I have seen programs like IBM Director installs an agent on a client
machine and gather all kinds of information remotely; eg. amount of
ram, processor type and speed, machine type and serial number, OS
running, netbios name etc.

Would it be possible to write something like this with ruby. Ideally,
the ruby program will run on Fedora or OpenBSD and the clients are
Windows XP machines. Once the program is being run it will ask for the
Windows box's user name and password to gather all the information and
will dump it in STDOUT.

Any hints or tips on where to start looking to write something like
this would be much appreciated.

Thanks.