Locating your Dell service tag without openmanage


Dell provides the openmanage suite of tools to monitor and report on the hardware in their servers. I’ve managed a few hosts in the past where openmanage wasn’t installed, and I needed to locate the service tag so I could get the hardware in the server serviced. Luckily for me the dmidecode utility was installed, which will print the SMBIOS data that was burned in by Dell at the factory:

$ dmidecode |more

.....
Handle 0x0100, DMI type 1, 25 bytes
System Information
Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
Product Name: PowerEdge 1650
Version: Not Specified
Serial Number: ABCDEFG
UUID: XXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
Wake-up Type: Power Switch

The “Serial Number:” value contains the service tag number of the server, and it should match up with the value in the BIOS as well as the one on the tag that is on the back of your server. So if you manage a Dell server that doesn’t have openmanage installed (and more importantly the omreport utility), dmidecode and lspci should make you very very happy. :)

This article was posted by Matty on 2011-05-05 09:00:00 -0400 -0400