You’ve shelled out the expenses for a reliable dedicated server for your business. It’s all said and done, and the funds are out of your account. Not only that, but now you’ve got access to the hardware, and have starting uploading your site files. However, how do you really know for sure if you got what you paid for? I mean, you can’t see the hardware yourself, so how do you know your web hosting provider isn’t giving you the finger by cutting corners in the dark?
Thanks to the beauty of Linux, and it’s various diagnostic tools, you can figure out pretty quick, actually. Use this guide and the commands held within to run a quick system analysis, a simple way to check if you’re actually sporting the hardware you aught to be.
Start With the Proc, Doc:
Seriously, the /proc file of your Linux directory is dedicated to nothing but logs, hardware information, and systems analyses. With that in mind, this is your first and best stop to figure out exactly what kind of equipment you’ve been saddled with. To check, simply access the directory with:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
Your printout should be something like this:
processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5150 @ 2.66GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 2660.033
cache size : 4096 KB
Obviously this is what’s important. Be sure to check that everything looks kosher, especially the model name of your CPU. If you paid for a Celeron, and have a Xeon, we’d suggest you give someone a call.
The Big One
There are a couple of other directories we could have you check, but if you really need to know more about your web server, there’s only one command left to run: the lshw command. This one tells you more than you ever wanted to know about your hardware, and with that in mind, you’ll want to save its massive output to a text file for easy perusal. To do so, simply run:
lshw > hardware-info
This will dump the command’s entire output to a simple text file named “hardware-info.” From there, you can open the file however you like, and scan its (truly extensive) hardware report. It will be rather complex, so be sure to pay extra attention. That being said, no matter what you’re looking for, it’s in there somewhere.