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Charly's Column – lshw

Article from Issue 232/2020
Author(s):

In order to avoid complaints from his children, Charly prefers to use lshw instead of a screwdriver to analyze his home firewall PC's hardware details.

For many years, a small, fanless industrial PC with two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces has served as a firewall in my home storeroom. The hardware is not very powerful, but it is just about sufficient for forwarding network packets and a few iptables rules.

I seem to recall that this device has 2GB RAM – but whether in the form of a 2GB module or as two 1GB modules, I really don't know. How many RAM slots are there anyway, and what is the maximum amount of RAM I could use if I decided to upgrade? I would like to find that out without taking the firewall off the Internet and removing its case, because that always provokes disrespectful comments from my kids: "What kind of availability is that, Dad?"

Hardware Lister, lshw, [1] is a reliable tool for answering questions about hardware. It elicits extensive information from the system about every installed hardware component – usually more than I ever wanted to know.

[...]

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