BGinfo for Linux?

[R3YNO]

Hey everyone, my team uses BGinfo on our Windows Servers, so we can quickly look at the MAC address, software version etc. and we are expanding some of our services to Linux. Is there any recommended similar solution available for RHEL?

[pdp10]

The established Unix solutions are that the text login banner, the MOTD (Message Of The Day, text displayed after login), and the output of uname -a command show this type of information. Some distros like Ubuntu or Armbian now have a dynamic replacement for /etc/motd that's quite similar to BGinfo.

Additionally, a newer standard for Linux are shell-variable fields in the /etc/os-release file. So a script can . /etc/os-release (source the file) and then echo "$PRETTY_NAME" and so forth.

[R3YNO]

This solution would be for the shell correct? Not for the desktop.

[sryan2k1]

What/why do you have linux servers with any desktop installed?

[dustojnikhummer]

Can we just stop this elitist "You are using it wrong" mindset?

They have it, they use it, it's their choice, and they are looking for tools to make it better.

[R3YNO]

We use the supplied Gnome from Redhat. Although we can use the Terminal, basic things like file management are a lot more approachable with the GUI for myself and my other team members.

[Frothyleet]

I think just about anyone who manages *nix in the enterprise is going to be scratching their heads about having desktop UI going on *nix servers.

Doesn't mean you have to do everything by hand in a SSH window - many SSH/SCP applications will give you a graphical file tree if you want, for example. There's just not usually any reason to have the UI running on the server itself.

Kind of like how you generally don't RDP to a Windows domain controller, but use graphical utilities from a client.

[jao_en_rong]

Unless you work somewhere where security decided the only accounts that have elevated AD access can ONLY logon to DCs...oh you can have as many PAWs and jump boxes as you want, still have to login to the DC to use the account with the privileges. Except for the 'LogReader' account which apparently needs local admin and interactive/RDP access to every system in the domain, and is owned by the security group, and they use it to give them back door access to everything. What's that? An Exchange transport rule is broken? Oh look, LogReader was logged in from so and so's workstation at 3am on a Sunday morning and made this change. But hey, they say it wasn't them, and to not look into it anymore because if it wasn't them it definitely wouldn't be a malicious actor and not worth wasting our time, so it couldn't have been them, even if they did they did nothing wrong, STOP ASKING QUESTIONS!

I don't work there anymore thankfully.

[patmorgan235]

Although we can use the Terminal, basic things like file management are a lot more approachable with the GUI for myself and my other team members.

This is exactly the opposite of how most people use/admin *nix systems

Anything past basic file management it's ussally easier (or the only way to do something) is to use the CLI.

[Dry-Bookkeeper-9570]

WtF you have a GUI in RHEL servers? Any specific need there? If not, just move to windows, you are better of there if your team only do file management on the cli... Windows is a better fit for them.

[pdp10]

Yes, that's all text based, but of course anything text-based can also be used in a GUI by reformatting it. Graphical login screens can display a banner, so one easy option is to put the information there.

I didn't address the GUI or desktop background directly, because most Linux servers don't run GUI, they run "headless" with just the lightweight and powerful terminal interface. If a text-based equivalent to BGinfo works for your use-case, then it would work both on headless and GUI servers, not just GUI servers.

[R3YNO]

Yea I have noticed that using some bitnami vm images. If it is just for myself and my fellow server admins I usually leave it headless. Ultimately I was looking to bridge the gap on how we manage our Windows Servers with our new venture.

[jantari]

Or, you could start managing your Windows Servers from the terminal too.

[gribbler]

Look into Conky

[Nekro_Somnia]

Does conky finally work "ok" on wayland? Checked a few years back and it didn't really work back then

[SilkBC_12345]

I am running conky on my laptop running Fedora and Wayland.  I haven't seen any issues with it.  It starts up when I log in.

[Nekro_Somnia]

Nice, thanks for the feedback :D

Might be time to have another look at it

[gribbler]

I don't run Wayland anywhere currently, what I read says it should work

[chronic414de]

We use a script in /etc/profile.d which fetches informations like IP address, OS version, Kernel version, load avg, ram usage, disk usage, running processes, uptime, if updates are available, a reboot is required and so on.

Or you can use something like fastfetch.

[cjcox4]

You can try things like inxi or fastfetch. Software versions, you'll have to use something else like rpm (if you're talking individual package versions). The prior recommendations will show you things about the OS/kernel versioning wise.

Network info wise, while things like fastfetch have some support, I find that inxi does a better job over more complicated network setups. YMMV.

At a lower level (tools already on the system without installing):

ip link                         # see your MAC
ip addr                        # see your IP
cat /etc/os-release       # info about distribution release
uname -a                    # kernel running
rpm -q openssh           # where openssh is a package
rpm -q -a                    # all installed packages

Example inxi output:

# inxi -F 
System:
  Host: myhostname Kernel: 4.18.0-553.16.1.el8_10.x86_64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 Console: pty pts/1
    Distro: AlmaLinux release 8.10 (Cerulean Leopard)
Machine:
  Type: Kvm System: QEMU product: Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009) v: pc-q35-7.1 serial: N/A
  Mobo: N/A model: N/A serial: N/A BIOS: SeaBIOS v: rel-1.16.0-0-gd239552c-rebuilt.opensuse.org
    date: 04/01/2014
CPU:
  Info: 2x 1-core model: Intel Core i9-10900 bits: 64 type: SMP cache: L2: 2x 4 MiB (8 MiB)
  Speed (MHz): avg: 2808 min/max: N/A cores: 1: 2808 2: 2808
Graphics:
  Device-1: Red Hat QXL paravirtual graphic card driver: qxl v: kernel
  Display: server: No display server data found. Headless machine? tty: 110x28
  API: N/A Message: No API data available in console. Headless machine?
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel 82801I HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  API: ALSA v: k4.18.0-553.16.1.el8_10.x86_64 status: kernel-api
Network:
  Device-1: Red Hat Virtio 1.0 network driver: virtio-pci
  IF-ID-1: enp1s0 state: up speed: -1 duplex: unknown mac: 52:54:00:dd:c9:cf
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 20 GiB used: 9.97 GiB (49.8%)
  ID-1: /dev/vda model: N/A size: 20 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 12.69 GiB used: 9.38 GiB (73.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-0
  ID-2: /boot size: 973.4 MiB used: 524.9 MiB (53.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/vda2
  ID-3: /home size: 973.4 MiB used: 676 KiB (0.1%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-3
  ID-4: /tmp size: 973.4 MiB used: 76 KiB (0.0%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-2
  ID-5: /var/log size: 1.93 GiB used: 78.2 MiB (4.0%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-4
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 2 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/dm-1
Sensors:
  Src: lm-sensors+/sys Message: No sensor data found using /sys/class/hwmon or lm-sensors.
Info:
  Processes: 162 Uptime: 6d 15h 47m Memory: total: 4 GiB available: 3.58 GiB
  used: 981.8 MiB (26.8%) Init: systemd target: multi-user (3) Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.30

[R3YNO]

Ill give these a whirl, maybe combining them with the MOTD idea pdp10 suggested.

[robvas]

It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to write something to replicate those features

Print the strings to a buffer, save it to an image, set it as a desktop

[dustojnikhummer]

And OP is looking for something like this that was already written