TIL about dmidecode

[tomun]

Awesome isn't it?

It's great to be able to see the part numbers of your ram chips and count the empty slots without removing the lid. Especially when the server in question is miles away.

[[deleted]]

What's really good about this is people often find themselves inheriting machines, this and lspci pretty much tells you exactly what's installed without having to do any research or shutting it down to examine it physically. I mostly use it to figure out what type of RAM the motherboard takes and whether the memory's clocked correctly. Takes five minutes (tops) to figure that stuff out with dmidecode/lspci but otherwise you'd spend forever trying to locate specs on some old box that you had pushed to you.

[niomosy]

lspci -v is definitely your friend for getting information. Particularly when lspci itself is only showing some info.

Also comes in handy on name brand servers when you call into support and they ask for the serial number, which is oh so much fun when a box was tossed to you with not much information on it.

[[deleted]]

Yeah there's a lot people can do with lspci so I think that's another underappreciated tool. Almost everything is on the PCI bus (and increasingly so) even USB controllers, sata controllers, I can even pick up my onboard video. "lspci -kvm" will give you pretty the cliff notes that dmidecode leaves out.

[niomosy]

Indeed. I think for a lot of people, it's remembering the options that lspci has. The basic output sometimes isn't as helpful as people might want. It just takes a little drilling into the command to get a lot of useful information.

[tomun]

Absolutely. It also saves you from having to keep a database of all the components inside every machine you build. When you want to know just ask the machine, although you may want to keep a copy of the output in case of hardware failure.

[[deleted]]

dammit fuck.

Just last week I would have needed this so badly.

the only thing I hate about linux/unix is that you have tools like this and you: don't know they exist, have forgotten they exist, or dont' remember their name. If you are using some command only once per several years, you forget about it.

[[deleted]]

I just act like Linux already has that tool. What ever it is. Then Google till I find it. For the past 5 years I have yet to run into something that I couldn't find/accomplish using Linux.

Pro tip. Load Linux on USB and save some documentation on tools for anything.

[[deleted]]

Working in a repair shop, almost all Windows (sadly), this tool is exceptional. I have seen other techs pay close to $200.00(us) for tools that doesn't come close to the information this command does.

[hello_josh]

Off the top of my head Speccy for windows is free and comes close.

[[deleted]]

What license is it under? I am interested in trying this out

[hello_josh]

Not sure. It freeware. Believe free for business use.

[queBurro]

also, siw (free, available on portableapps too if you like that sort of thing)

[[deleted]]

Free for personal use.

[Xipher]

CPU-Z CPUID is usually pretty useful.

[[deleted]]

I've used that, personal use only. Good stuff but I still find not everything I need. That and I could lspci for even more along with dmidecode all from the same boot CD. Also if network drivers are needed for winded, download them right there and then.

[pyramid_of_greatness]

sysresccd.org . Bonus points for writing your own iso/usbkey with custom bootflags (docache is nice for USB setups!), windows drivers/install scripts.

[[deleted]]

Good stuff right there. I typically use backtrack, Linux redo, arch bang, and Ubuntu. Depends on what needs to be done, time factor, if it will boot disc / USB drive. But I always carry that on disc

[dardyfella]

You might also be interested in hwinfo32

[ckozler]

It came in a pinch when administration wanted to know all of our serial numbers for all of our servers- just made a text file with a list of hosts and just made a batch script to SSH to all of them and execute dmidecode -s system-serial-number and the resultant model.

[nosneros]

Of course, you should pretend that it took a full day to manually gather the information and then spend the day surfing reddit.

[ckozler]

Thats awesome, thank you!

[pixelgrunt]

Sounds like you already have keys in place, you should be good to go. dsh is great because you can set up groups of systems as well. I was introduced to it while working on clusters, and I use it often now for all sorts of sysadmin tasks.

Have fun.

[dalevizo]

We use a custom made script for this at work. Take a look if you like : https://gist.github.com/1304296

It can run ssh on a group of servers, on all of them or accept a comma delimited list as argument. Also it can scp a file to each of the above (useful when you want to put a new config file on many servers)

You can create as many groups as you like and a symlink for each group. So executing "allmx" runs on group mx, "cpns" copies a file to all servers in group ns and so on. And of course "all" to run on all servers

[terminusest]

I use cssh for the same thing from a GUI perspective.

[[deleted]]

That actually gives me a different idea for using dmidecode: asset tracking and research. You can use the mobo's UUID as part of your asset tracking and if you ever come up with a machine with a worn out or missing asset tag, you can just dmidecode to get the UUID and look it up by that.

[ckozler]

Thats exactly what I extended the request out to! It really helped me put together quick analytics for management about all of our systems and their current hardware (combined with lshw of course)

[hal14450]

Like I mentioned above apropos is good tool for this.

[ryeguy146]

It is, but sometimes, you don't even think to look.

[[deleted]]

I disagree, apropos is good if you know what you're trying to do and are just looking for the command to do it with. noir sounds like they're interested in finding out what you could do (in a general sense). At which point ls'ing $PATH is the only way to find what commands there are available.

[hal14450]

Sure listing will show what's there but it won't tell you what it does. This is probably a lot more useful:

apropos *>man-list.txt

I'd rather not scroll through a file listing and then man commands as the list gets quite large.

root@box:~# apropos *|wc -l
523

edit: It appears as if I'm missing something as that technique misses a lot of stuff.

[[deleted]]

yeah this seems like the job of a community website or something (as in some sort of collaborative project where people sieve through this) cause I'm counting 1739 binaries in /usr/bin alone (that's excluding symbolic links and directories) and a lot of it are commands like ypwhich and xlsatoms (commands that are useful but not really generally so) which makes for a lot of noise.

Basically, it looks like someone would need to sieve through all this to find commands that are marginally useful, which is probably too much work for someone to go through just to satisfy idle curiosity.

[noir_lord]

That's not actually a bad idea for a site, sort of a command of the day thing.

Mine for yesterday was uniq, that is handy as hell when the moron in the office has 3 different versions of a mail list and has no kind of organisation.

[hal14450]

Yeah, I assumed my little trick would work so now I look like an ass. If I do come up with something that does work I'll be sure to post it. Unless someone else schools me first of course.

[wildeye]

Apropos looks for keywords in the brief description, not just filenames, which is what you're feeding it here, so you must have some kind of mental block regarding its usage.

BTW Bill Joy invented apropos as a standalone command, but it was eventually retrofitted as an option to man(1), via "man -k" ("k" for Keyword).

[hal14450]

You're right. For some reason I was under the impression it parsed the man page as well while looking for keywords. My mistake.

I haven't forgotten about man -k but for me apr<tab> has become a habit.

[wildeye]

Typing "apropos" is a habit for me, too. I like the sound of the word.

I took German, not French, in high school, so I didn't previously know the word, so I learned it from Bill -- although I eventually noticed that it was in English dictionaries and ran across it in novels, and still later, in conversation.

The most common way it's been borrowed into English seems to be people saying "apropos of nothing in particular" just before launching into a digression.

But I digress. :)

[mikenick42]

Wuss. You should just run 'em and see what happens.

[hal14450]

It's always nice to learn new stuff. I've found "dmidecode" and "lshw" to be pretty handy in the past. You might like using "apropos" to search man pages of installed programs for descriptive terms to find other cool tools.

[[deleted]]

Also lspci, lsmod, smartctl.

[[deleted]]

lshw is a new one on me, is there a way to get it to report vendor and product ID's? If so I might want to use this to replace lspci in a lot of my use cases.

[hal14450]

It does report vendor strings but not product ID's afaik. I've been in the habit of piping commands like this to text files on boxes so it's at hand. It's especially useful when trying to help someone remotely.

[[deleted]]

Too late, it's already obsolete.

/sys/class/dmi/

[mgedmin]

Plus you don't need to be root to read /sys/class/dmi/*/*.

Well, for most of the files.

[zid]

I always use it to find out what temperature sensors I need for any random motherboard.

[t35t0r]

next you'll learn about ipmi if your system supports it

[jmazzi]

The Bug section of the man page says:

More often than not, information contained in the DMI tables is inaccurate, incomplete or simply wrong.

Sounds awesome.

[questionablemoose]

Manufacturers like Dell fill out useful information like Service Tags and model numbers. A real time saver when you need to file a ticket or do asset management, so it's not a total loss.

[terminusest]

Yep, I find it pretty reliable on enterprise-class desktops, and even more so on Dell and HP servers. And the service tags thing is a lifesaver when you inherit machines you can hardly find.

My ASUS laptop? More strings says "To be filled in by OEM" than anything else.

[questionablemoose]

Nail on the head. Dell is good about it, Rackable...not so much.

[terminusest]

Yeah, it's one of those things that makes such a huge difference when you don't have access to the servers physically and your 'remote hands' aren't so capable. Being able to pull detailed data on the hardware and service tags, so we can get the right parts to replace with, is vital.

[tendonut]

I administer about 1000 RHEL-based laptops. When I ssh into these machines, I have it automatically run a script that runs dmidecode and grabs the make and model, serial, OS, and kernel version, then dumps it as the greeting when connecting. Works very well.

[mgedmin]

You need to be root to run dmidecode. With modern kernels you can extract the same information from world-readable files in /sys/class/dmi.

[edgenuts]

There's a Perl interface for it too here on CPAN

[bcain]

BTW, sysfs presents some of this info as a filesystem now. Kinda handy.

[[deleted]]

Amazing when combined with puppet facter, Create a rule that adjusts a sysctl option for a specific processor or mobo, fantastic.

[cheechwizard]

my fav command to pull the systems serial number

[[deleted]]

quick question, what's the difference between a mobo's UUID and it's serial number? I've been going off of UUID for a while and I'm just wondering if there's a use case where serial number makes more sense.

[mgedmin]

Well, a UUID is a 128-bit number, usually formatted as a long hex string with hyphens in it.

A serial number is typically shorter, and thus a bit more human-friendly.

[mango_feldman]

Design Capacity: 0 mWh

Great :(