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I'm confronted with a bewildering array of linux boxen.

How do I find out how many processors they have, how many cores, how much RAM they have, how fast their disks are, how heavily loaded they are by competing people etc, etc?

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I am sure there are linux compatible libraries that would allow a custom program access the information your looking for. I don't actually see a question that can be given an answer. – Ramhound Sep 23 '11 at 13:23
May I suggest a rewrite? I'm pretty sure this question should read "What program can I run to take an inventory of the Linux boxes on my network, and give me an easily-understood report on their hardware, software, and current loading?" Because if that's your question, John, it's one that actually does have an answer. Cilck the "edit" link and if necessary just paste in my language. – CarlF Sep 23 '11 at 13:44

closed as too localized by Diogo, David, random♦ Sep 23 '11 at 14:16

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1 Answer

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I'm not aware of any 'general purpose' tool that will gather everything you want.

However, all of this information is available if you want to script something yourself.

For hardware information, there's no single place but you might want to start in /proc/

Check out the wikipedia article here: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Procfs#Linux

Highlights include:

/proc/cpuinfo, containing information about the CPU, such as its vendor (and CPU family, model and model names which should allow users to identify the CPU) and its speed (CPU clockspeed), cache size, number of siblings, cores, and CPU flags. It contains a value called "bogomips", frequently misunderstood as measure CPU-speed like a benchmark, while it doesn't actually measure any sensible (for end-users) value at all. It occurs as a side-effect of kernel timer calibration and yields highly varying values depending on CPU type, even at equal clock speeds.

/proc/meminfo, containing a summary of how the kernel is managing its memory.

/proc/diskstats, giving some information (including device numbers) for each of the logical disk devices

There are then also commands such as lspci & lsusb which'll tell you what's plugged in in an 'easier' form.

As for finding out how used the machine is... that's not the most straightforward thing to determine and I'm going to leave that alone..

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