In Trick 8, you saw an example of using the command line to get information about the total memory in the system. In this trick, I'll offer up a few other methods to collect important information from the system you may need to verify, troubleshoot, or give to remote support.
First, let's gather information about the processor. This is easily done as follows:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo .
This command gives you information on the processor speed, quantity, and model. Using grep in many cases can give you the desired value.
A check that I do quite often is to ascertain the quantity of processors on the system. So, if I have purchased a dual processor quad-core server, I can run:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l .
I would then expect to see 8 as the value. If I don't, I call up the vendor and tell them to send me another processor.
Another piece of information I may require is disk information. This can be gotten with the df command. I usually add the -h flag so that I can see the output in gigabytes or megabytes. # df -h also shows how the disk was partitioned.
And to end the list, here's a way to look at the firmware of your system—a method to get the BIOS level and the firmware on the NIC.
To check the BIOS version, you can run the dmidecode command. Unfortunately, you can't easily grep for the information, so piping it is a less efficient way to do this. On my Lenovo T61 laptop, the output looks like this:
#dmidecode | less
...
BIOS Information
Vendor: LENOVO
Version: 7LET52WW (1.22 )
Release Date: 08/27/2007
...
This is much more efficient than rebooting your machine and looking at the POST output.
To examine the driver and firmware versions of your Ethernet adapter, run ethtool:
# ethtool -i eth0
driver: e1000
version: 7.3.20-k2-NAPI
firmware-version: 0.3-0
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