Hi Folks,
After hunting around to find that you can't get the serial number that is written on the chasis with a command, I got a tip about storing it in EEPROM. I am going to store the serial # in the OEM-BANNER attribute. Is there any functional harm in doing so or anything I should know about that will cause the system harm? I am planning on doing this to all our Sun Servers as a standard.
Thanks!
Pat
Strictly speaking, you wouldn't have to install sneep on all of the servers to get the benefits of sneep, (e.g. being obvious, being understood by explorer and some internal Sun analysis tools, being able to repair the serial in the explorer configuration file when it gets wiped out, being able to store other things, and following an established convention )
You can just run a copy of the sneep script on a machine once without actually installing anything, or you can make a one-time manual entry in the eeprom nvramrc variable formatted the way that sneep expects it.
Either of these will get you almost all of the benefits of having sneep installed.
Afterward (in both cases) retrieving the serial *is* just running the eeprom command.( "eeprom nvramrc" )
However, when sneep is installed, it will validate the serial on each reboot and can restore it if it gets wiped out by mistake or eeprom reset or eeprom replacement.
In addition, sneep will let you easily store other relevant things in the eeprom like asset tags, contact info, contract info - whatever needs to be closely associated with the hardware and protected.
Still, using the OEM banner doesn't cause any harm - and it has the advantage of being immune to eeprom reset - but it is quite limited, compared with sneep.
Sneep was written partly to overcome the limitations of the oem-banner technique. However, if you only need the minimum functionality, oem-banner is a decent option.
But I'm biased....
