Dell Service Tag number via the Linux command-line

Get your Dell Service Tag number via the Linux command-line


When your server is located in a data center far away, it makes it difficult to walk over to the box and read the service tag off of it. Fortunately, the Service Tag is stored somewhere in the system BIOS, and is accessible with the ‘dmidecode’ utility.

[root@host ~]# dmidecode|grep "Serial Number"
                Serial Number: 85NV1BS

You’ll probably see several other serial numbers in there as well for things like your hard drives or other devices. The Dell shouldn’t be too difficult to pick out. I think they are always 7 digits and have letters in middle. There is lots of other interesting things in the ‘dmidecode’ output too, like the speed and type of each RAM module installed, and a description of all of the onboard devices (ie: video and network cards)
With Windows

Thanks to @kleinbaas who commented below how to do the same thing on a Windows machine:

  C:\Documents and Settings\PAPS>wmic bios get serialnumber
  SerialNumber
  RX51DE

Finding CPU Socket and Core using Dmidecode

We can also discover some simple CPU count information through our first two tools. Each tool views the system differently so we need to be aware of what we are looking at. Dmidecode views the system from a socket perspective and cpuinfo views the system from a core perspective (which can be either an independent CPU or cores within a single CPU – AMD versus Intel ideology.)

    dmidecode | grep "Central Processor" | wc -l
    4

    grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
    8

As you can see, it is important to know which view of the processor you are speaking about. This will become ever more important as CPUs continue to increase in cores per CPU, CPUs per socket and threads per core!

How to Count CPU Core and Socket using the CLI

We can also discover some simple CPU count information through our first two tools. Each tool views the system differently so we need to be aware of what we are looking at. Dmidecode views the system from a socket perspective and cpuinfo views the system from a core perspective (which can be either an independent CPU or cores within a single CPU – AMD versus Intel ideology.)

dmidecode | grep "Central Processor" | wc -l
4

grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
8

As you can see, it is important to know which view of the processor you are speaking about. This will become ever more important as CPUs continue to increase in cores per CPU, CPUs per socket and threads per core!