Useful System Probing Commands

DMIdecode

If you've ever managed a large Linux installation, and dealt with a sudden policy change from "on high" that, all of a sudden, you are to have a spreadsheet of ALL your Linux machines, including make/model of each system and exactly what chipsets are used on the motherboard, the dmidecode command/package is your new best friend. It's the only thing I've found in Linux which will reliably extract the hardware make and model (i.e. HP DL380) from a system without the need to make a physical inventory of each and every system. You will have to do some parsing of the XML output, but it's ridiculously better than having to manually audit all of your hardware! The good news is that, when bundled with a decent configuration management tool such as CFengine or Puppet, your DMIdecode'ing Perl script can be automatically rolled out to all the hosts so that the spreadsheet can be centrally generated.

-- SeanNewton - 08 Jan 2008