Dell Service Tag
In order to talk to Dell about equipment you bought from them you need the ```Dell Service Tag``` which is a 7-character string of capital letters and numbers that is printed on a tiny brown sticker somewhere on the front or back of the machine. This can be a pain in the ass if you didn't realize how critical this number is and did not include it in your inventory list of your servers. Luckily, you can get the Dell Service Tag from a machine remotely. It turns out that Dell puts the Service Tag in the BIOS. so you can query the BIOS for the Service Tag. This can be done without rebooting from the command-line of both Linux and Windows.
Linux
dmidecode -s system-serial-number 2M1XDB1
Some systems such as Red Hat and CentOS don't support the '-s' option so these system may need to do something a little tricky (it will probably print twice):
dmidecode | grep --extended-regexp Serial[[:space:]]Number:[[:space:]]*[A-Z0-9]{7}$ Serial Number: 2M1XDB1 Serial Number: 2M1XDB1
Windows
In Windows you can use a tiny VBScript to query the WMI for the Service Tag.
Save this script as `service_tag.vbs`:
If WScript.Arguments.Count = 0 Then Wscript.Echo "Usage: GetDesllSvcTag.vbs computer1 [computer2] [computer3] ......" WScript.Quit End If For Each strComputer In wscript.Arguments Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colSMBIOS = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_SystemEnclosure") For Each objSMBIOS in colSMBIOS Wscript.Echo strComputer & ": " & objSMBIOS.SerialNumber Next Next
Start up a Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and run the `service_tag.vbs` script to get something like this:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop>service_tag.vbs 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1: 2M1XDB1