Make Room!

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.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Where Did It Go?

    To write low-level scripts, as an admin, you need to know whether you are currently on a physical or a virtual machine. Charly finds out with a couple of clever hacks.

    more »
  • Charly's Column – SparkFun

    Is your neighbor burning the wrong kind of wood or did a couple of VWs just pass by your house? Charly finds out with a sensor. For an attractive approach to visualizing boring measurement figures, you can either use your own web server or rely on a specialized service like SparkFun.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind: DenyHosts

    When it comes to warding off unwanted login tests on SSH port 22 and others, Charly likes to keep an ace or two up his sleeve by relying on DenyHosts instead of Fail2ban.

    more »
  • Charly's Column – Doorbell Pi

    When Charly puts on his headphones at home, he often fails to hear the doorbell. So, he dreamed up a solution with a Raspberry Pi Zero, a noise detector, and a power outlet with a LAN connection.

    more »
  • Charly's Column – The Fuck

    In the 25 years of Linux kernel history, a huge amount of code and many comments have accumulated. They can be explanatory, enlightening, funny, or even profane. Charly prefers to do things differently, so he types fuck in the shell.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus