Shell Script To Report Linux Server Hardware Information

Please click above for a slightly larger view of the beginning of the output today's script provides :)

Hey There,

Well, I guess it's about time we starting putting some more shell scripts out there. The last 3 or 4 posts have all been how-to's (except the last one, which I suppose you could trim all the surrounding text and make a script out of ;) and it's high time to start hitting the shell again.

Today's offering is something we cooked up to tiptoe the fine-line between producing what a manager wants to see and what an administrator wants to see in a quick system profile. This has been tested on RedHat Linux and SUSE (only up to release 9.x). The only major difference is some extra output in the "SERVER - MEMORY" section (mostly when run on x86_64 architecture machines) that some of you may find useful.

If you're interested in something more basic, or generic, check out our previous posts on gathering system information on Solaris and gathering system information on RedHat Linux.

This is a pretty straightforward shell script offering that basically parses the output of the hwinfo command. We run it in "--short" mode for most options, but leave it long for parts where the shortening process removed vital information (Like the brand name of the server). It's formatted loosely, but is fairly easy to read. One of the things I like most about it (and the main reason I started writing it in the first place) is that it highlights the Manufacturer, Model and Serial number of the machine your Linux OS is running on. This generally isn't an issue when you're, say, running Solaris on your Sun box ;) Then, of course, I couldn't get away from putting in all the basic information about CPU, Memory, Disks, etc.

If you want to know more about your system than this little shell script will show you, the hwinfo command has a variety of options I chose not to include (Neither my manager nor I want to know about every little "debug" detail of the PCI controller unless we have to ;), but you can access just about any hardware related information using that command. Just run it as:

host # hwinfo --help

Assuming, of course, that you've run this script already as:

host # ./server_info.sh

and found it lacking.

If hwinfo isn't available on your machine (Oh, yes. Be sure you're "root" when you run this or you might not have the access required to pull some of the information hwinfo tries to get for you!), there are a number of other options available to you, both on SUSE, RedHat and different flavors of Linux. Off the top of my head, you can always give these commands a shot (assuming they exist ;) --> kudzu, lspci, lsusb, dmidecode and a great project (which even has a GUI now) called lshw. You should check that out if you or your manager dig this little shell script :)

Cheers,





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/bin/bash

#
# server_info.sh - display server hardware info
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
# 

hwinfo="/usr/sbin/hwinfo --short"
hostname=`hostname`
separator="----------------------------------------"
echo $separator
echo "System Information For $hostname"
echo $separator
echo $separator
echo SERVER - MEMORY
echo $separator
/usr/sbin/hwinfo --bios|egrep 'OEM id:|Product id:|CPUs|Product:|Serial:|Physical Memory Array:|Max. Size:|Memory Device:|Location:|Size:|Speed:|Location:'|sed -e 's/"//g' -e '/^ *Speed: */s/Memory Device:/\n  Memory Device:/' -e 's/\(Max. Speed:\)/CPU \1 MHz/' -e 's/\(Current Speed\)/CPU \1 MHz/'
echo $separator
echo SMP
echo $separator
$hwinfo --smp
echo $separator
echo CPU
echo $separator
$hwinfo --cpu
echo $separator
echo CD_ROM
echo $separator
/usr/sbin/hwinfo --cdrom|egrep '24:|Device File:|Driver:'|awk -F":" '{ if ( $1 ~ /[0-9][0-9]*/ ) print $0; else print "  " $2}'|sed -e 's/^.*[0-9] //' -e 's/ //' -e 's/"//g'
echo $separator
echo DISK
echo $separator
$hwinfo --disk
echo $separator
echo PARTITION
echo $separator
$hwinfo --partition
echo $separator
echo NETWORK
echo $separator
$hwinfo --network
echo $separator
echo NETCARD
echo $separator
$hwinfo --netcard
echo $separator

, Mike

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