Ever find yourself having to look into the particulars of your servers’ hardware? Maybe you go scrounging for the original invoice or for some email you were sent several years ago or the quote that was generated when you were about to purchase it? Well, stop, there’s an alternative that you’re probably going to like quite a bit. You can get your hardware to tell you about itself. Just use a command called dmidecode.

The name “dmidecode” might not ring any bells, but the “dmi” part of the name stands for
“Desktop Management Interface”. It’s an API that allows you to gather information about the your system’s underlying hardware. The command is designed to work on any Linux system as it was originally designed by a consortium — the Desktop Management Task Force — for gathering information and configuring systems.

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