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.