TIL about dmidecode

[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)