I recently needed to acquire the Dell service tag number of a remote linux server. The method I used to do so was simple. I used the following command:

‘dmidecode -s system-serial-number’

Depending on your system, you may be able to obtain the following information using ‘dmidecode -s’:

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Here is a site that has training materials for the 101 and 102 level LPI Linux certification exams.  There are links to both the .pdf and Openoffice file formats.

I came across an interesting project last week while doing some research on OpenSolaris and zfs.  The distribution is called Nexenta.  The kernel of Nexenta is based on opensolaris, however the userspace tools are based on Debian/Ubuntu.

There is also a commercial offshoot called the Nexenta storage appliance which is a the Nexentra distribution packaged as a zfs based storage server.  Pricing is dependant on the maxium size of the storage pool.

I have downloaded the free version and am currently planning testing this distro with Gluster as well.  The FUSE project (which is required by a Gluster client to mount the filesystem) is currently not stable on opensolaris.  However I plan on using Nexenta as the server bricks of the Gluster cluster and using Linux as the client, since FUSE has no issues running on Linux.