== Notes on getting a Solaris hardware inventory

Being able to find out what hardware is in a random machine is one of
those things you don't think about very much until you inherit
responsibility for a bunch of machines that you didn't build yourself.

The best hardware inventory program I've used is SGI's _hinv_
(although it doesn't have enough disk information). Linux has decent
hardware inventory support, but not bundled into a single command; you
have to look through a bunch of _/proc_ files and know a few commands
like _lspci_. Unfortunately, Solaris is less friendly.

The old-fashioned way to get hardware information is to look at the
kernel's boot messages; on Solaris this is in syslog or via _dmesg_.
However, these logs get aged away if the system has been up for a
while. (I've been known to arrange for kernel syslog messages to never
expire, but I haven't set that up on my Solaris systems yet.)

The best program seems to be _prtdiag_, which gives CPU, memory, and
some hardware slot information (and works for non-root users, always a
bonus). There's also _prtconf_ and a number of others, but they don't
seem to give much additional useful information about hardware.

The names of stuff in _/devices_ has a some information, but I suspect
a good familiarity with Solaris device driver names is needed for best
results. (Solaris _/proc_ is for processes only, so there is nothing
like Linux's collection of informative files.)

(People seem to use Magnicomp's _sysinfo_ a fair bit, but it's
commercial software (with a 30 day free trial), and binary packages on
systems without real package managers make me twitchy.  And its
installer has glitches that don't inspire confidence.)