Solaris

try iostat -E

iostat -E is great for getting the serial number of the individual drives, but sometimes (like to place a service call on a storage array) you need the serial number of the overall storage unit.

There is a need for a safe and conveniently accessible place to put this kind of information. For several reasons, having it in a file in the filesystem is less than ideal, and keeping it somewhere off of the system has even more drawbacks.

This is not to say that these commonly-used methods for tracking this information are not workable or useful, but sneep has some unique characteristics which make it especially suitable for this kind of task.

Something has to keep that information and since everything can be changed out, i.e. motherboard, chips, etc., the serial number either has to be entered in manually or put on the chassis. Guess which one? That serial number is like anything you can purchase in a store, a tracking number to show where and when it was manufactured so they can correlate issues with the manufacturing process, i.e. a bunch of bad chips, drives, etc.

If you use snmp to monitor the server, you can also use one of those fields to enter the SN on. And to better the reading process, keep that packing slip when you get the server because the number and the original part list is on it. Write the name of the server on that piece of paper, for backup, along with entering it in your asset db.

This was true in 2003 when it was posted.
In 2008, quite a few of the newer Sun machines do report the chassis serial number in the output of prtdiag -v ; generally at the end.

This is one of the places that sneep looks for the serial.

The serial that you see in the OBP banner is just the hostid in decimal . It is (usually) related to the ethernet MAC address.


On some Sun platforms, it is possible to get the serial from the command line, but there are several different ways to do it.
The simplest way is to let sneep hunt it down for you .
If your machine doesn't know its serial number, you can tell sneep what it is, and sneep will keep track of it for you after that.

It will also track other useful information like rack location, contract number, or whatever you want.
See the sneep download page for more information.

... and why would you do init 0 before pressing stop-A? You either shut the machine graciously with init 0, or you halt it with stop-A.
... and why do have keyboards attached to servers?

The serial that pops up in the banner is not the serial number of the server

it is now possibel with solaris 10:

#ipmitool fru

and in the output check the serial for the chassis type:

FRU Device Description : mb.fru (ID 4)
Chassis Type : Rack Mount Chassis

But, I think that IPMI is Intel only. This won't work with Sparcs. But I could be wrong... do the new Sun4v Sparcs support IPMI?