Communication between PCI bus and ethernet adapter on PCs

Hi

I am assigned a task of developing a device which need to be connected with the PCI bus of the computer. This device will accept data from internet through an ethernet adapter and then will do a diagnosis on the computer hardware to look for any hardware related problems. There will be a microcontroller which will send/receive data to/from computer from/to the internet server.

Since I am a novice in electronics and embedded systems, can anyone please guide me on this? It will be highly appreciated if your experts can advice me to take the first step on this.

Thanks in advance.

Regards

Sujith M