Posts Tagged ‘Dell’

Dell Service Tag from Bios

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

I found a neat way to get bios/service tag info about a computer without using a dell utility.

Linux

dmidecode -q | grep -E ‘System Info|Serial’ | grep -n1 System | tail -n1 | awk ‘{print $4;}’

(mileage may vary depending on BIOS – better to try dmidecode -q | less to see the whole output if the above doesn’t work)

Windows XP:

wmic bios get serialnumber

UPDATE (Feb 4 2011): Alan (our linux sysadmin) found another tool which will give you hardware info on linux servers, including the serial number.  It is called lshw (you can use lshw -html or -xml to output into either format).  It is available for installation on ubuntu and debian.

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The little binary that could: Dellmgr

Friday, September 19th, 2008

The cluster downtime was avoided, thanks to some helpful advice from Dell.  Our cluster uses a pair of PowerVault 220S enclosures which are configured in a RAID 5 array.  When two of the drives in each enclosure went into predictive failure mode, we needed to replace them to ensure the integrity of our data.  Since we’re running Rocks for the cluster os, the dell openmanage tools that would allow us to do the hotswap while the cluster was running weren’t available.

 I didn’t want to install the openmanage software since it seemed to have a large number of modules and really looked like it might be work (which I try to avoid). A dell rep I talked to recommended DELLmgr instead. He told me to ignore the other rpms, and install only the following: Dellmgr-5.25-0.i386.rpm . It installs one file, dellmgr.bin, that talks to the PERC controller card and gives you an interface very similar to the one used in the card’s BIOS, no restart required. I was able to fail the faulty drives and do the rebuild without having to alter the cluster’s running state at all.

 It’s a shame that dell no longer supports it and hasn’t released a version for the new controller cards.

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