Photo courtesy of B Naveen Kumar dmidecode command reads the system DMI table to display hardware and BIOS information of the server. Apart from getting current configuration of the system, you can also get information about maximum supported configuration of the system using dmidecode. For example, dmidecode gives both the current RAM on the system [...]
Hardware
When you call DELL customer support for any help, they will ask for either Service Tag or Express Service Code. You also need service tag to download drivers and documentations from DELL support website. When you have physical access to the system, you can easily identify the service tag affixed on the body of the [...]
Photo courtesy of wraithtdk Companies purchase support for most of their enterprise hardwares (servers, switches, routers, firewalls etc.,) and softwares (databases, OS, applications, frameworks etc.,). They spend lot of cash on support mainly for two reasons: 1) To get help from vendors to fix critical production issues 2) To keep up-to-date with the latest version [...]
If you are managing more than one equipment in your organization, it is very important to document and track ALL information about the servers effectively. In this article, I have listed 36 attributes that needs to be tracked for your equipments, with an explanation on why it needs to be tracked. I have also provided [...]
Expanding the capacity of a server by adding new disk drives is a typical activity for administrator. In this article, let us review how to add two new disk drives to the DELL server and create RAID 1 using “Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller – PERC” configuration utility. This tool is also called as “PERC/CERC [...]
PERC/CERC Configuration utility from DELL is used to manage the disks on the server and perform several disk related activities. for e.g. Create Logical Volumes with different RAID options, check for the consistency of the disks etc. During the server startup process, there is an option to Launch the PERC/CERC configuration utility. However sometimes it [...]
Sometimes it may be necessary to find out whether there are any issues with the memory or other hardware components on a server. Typically it is recommended to perform this kind of test on a server before deploying for production usage. DELL has provided few tools to perform hardware diagnostics on DELL Servers. Let us [...]
My name is Ramesh Natarajan. I will be posting instruction guides, how-to, troubleshooting tips and tricks on Linux, database, hardware, security and web. My focus is to write articles that will either teach you or help you resolve a problem. Read more about