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Pierre
Asked: 2010-01-29 07:59:28 +0800 CST

Linux CLI command for ~"what is this machine"?

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is there a standard command for Linux that would provide a description of the server? (Things like model, number of cores, speed...)

linux command-line-interface

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Not really no (in general, how do you define "description"?), but you can pull most of that info using dmidecode.

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  2. Ubuntu provides lshw in ubuntu-standard, it will be on any distribution ending with "untu". Many other distributions have their own tools, a lot of it can be found in /proc. You can find the man page for lshw here

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  3. dmesg shows load of your hardware too.

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  4. cat /proc/cpuinfo = CPU information
lspci = Shows PCI card Hardware name
uname -a = Shows kernel version, architecture & build date/host
cat /proc/meminfo = memory (wired + vm) info

    These have worked on every linux system i've seen. lspci is part of the pciutils package, and relies on a database of PCI id's. The stuff in /proc would only be the pci id's)

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  5. Try these:

    # uname -a

# dmidecode

# vpddecode
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  6. "dmidecode" is present in all linux distribution and usually enough, to find most relevant parts together with serialnumbers.

    The standard tool in Debian and Suse however is "hwinfo". It is a very comprehensive DeviceInfo-tool, and I wish (based on habbits) it would be standard accross all distributions.

    For a short Overview you type 

    hwinfo --short

    You can combine --short with specific devices like --cpu and --disk. 

    hwinfo --short --cpu --disk

    For everything you simply type 

    hwinfo

    Or specific to a devicetype:

    hwinfo --netcard

    you get a complete list of features with 

    hwinfo --help

    In addition "smartctl --all" shows special informations about harddrives, not shown in any other tool.

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  7. Puppet facter from PuppetLabs provides an interface to identify hardware on a system. facter can work without Puppet itself, can be extended to gather your own facts, and runs on many Operating Systems.

    I'm using facter, along with Puppet and The Foreman as a Puppet ENC to keep track of hardware. Facter provides a frontend to disparate tools like dmidecode, cat /proc/cpuinfo, MAC=ifconfig en0 |grep ether |cut -f2 -d" ", and then information is all presented in a neat, orderly format. I've used it on RHEL, Ubuntu, Mac OS X, FreeBSD & Solaris-- gathering this information on my own was maddening. Puppet facter does much of the work for you.

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