How do you find system manufacturer/model on Linux without root access?

I'm working on a module for Condor that will collect hardware information so that we can use realistic numbers to compute power savings, etc. The difficulty is that I don't maintain most of the client systems, so I have to write this with no assumptions as to what may or may not be installed on the system and I can't do anything that requires root access.

I've looked at various utilities (lshal, lshw, hwinfo, etc) and none of them seem to be universal across both Debian- and RedHat-based systems. I have neither the authority nor the desire to force other departments on campus to have one of those packages installed.

dmidecode seems to be pretty universal, but it's not helpful without root privileges. I haven't been able to find any files in /proc that contain the system manufacturer and model. Is there something I'm missing or do I need to try to get all of the distributed admins to install one of the aforementioned utilities?

You're going to need dmidecode to get that info-and even that isn't going to guarantee you can get the correct hardware info. It should work for Dell and HP server machines, but everything outside of their gets kind of dicey.

It's a bit second-hand, but you might try running 'dmesg' and seeing if anything interesting is there. Doesn't (usually) require root privs.