Problem:

Users often need to know hardware and OS specs for Unix machines. Common needs include determining which version of software to run, documenting hardware used for computations in papers, and comparing servers to determine which is likely to run a compute job faster.

GT ISyE runs Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux in both its commercial and free versions -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora. However there is a wide mix of versions and hardware that can be confusing for users.
 

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Solution:

To determine hardware and OS info on Linux:

"uname -a" will show kernel version and hardware platform.
"cat /etc/issue" will show the distribution and version.
"cat /proc/cpuinfo" will show processor information.
"free" will show physical RAM.

To determine this info on Solaris:

"uname -a" will print the OS version and hardware platform.
"isainfo -v" will show platform type and whether it's 32-bit or 64-bit.
"psrinfo -v" will show processor information.
"top" will show physical RAM (along with a good bit of process information).

Linux examples:


wren:~ $ uname -a
Linux wren 2.6.18-8.1.8.el5 #1 SMP Mon Jun 25 17:06:07 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

This shows Linux kernel 2.6.18 running on a 64-bit x86 processor.

wren:~ $ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 8178540 983992 7194548 0 147216 144348
-/+ buffers/cache: 692428 7486112
Swap: 4194296 615092 3579204

The "total" column indicates the machine has 8GB physical RAM and 4GB swap space.

Solaris examples:

castle:~ $ uname -a
SunOS castle 5.9 Generic_118558-06 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4

Solaris 9 is listed as SunOS 5.9, Solaris 10 is SunOS 5.10, etc.

So Castle is a Solaris 9 server running on the UltraSparc platform, but this doesn't show whether the machine can run 64-bit code. To find out, do:

castle:~ $ isainfo -v
64-bit sparcv9 applications
32-bit sparc applications