Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Your Server with boxinfo

by Joe Brockmeier - Jan. 20, 2010Comments (0)

Any system administrator worth their salt has some kind of system for collecting and maintaining information about all the systems they're responsible for. Gathering that info by hand, especially when the systems are inherited, can be time-consuming. Or you could try out boxinfo, a Perl script that gathers most or all of the information you'd want in a few easy steps.

Boxinfo is simple to run, just run it on any Linux system that has Perl and it will look for information about the disk space, processor, memory, network interfaces, mounted disks, versions of utilities, and general system environment. Once finished, it prints out an HTML page or page in Wikimedia format, and a debug file that shows all commands run and the output. This can be useful to identify Perl modules you might be missing to gather information.

It's a pretty simple tool to use, but no doubt took quite some time to put together. A sample of the output is available on the site. Boxinfo isn't the only tool I've run across that can do something like this, but it's well worth looking at.

The script was released by Greg Sabino Mullane, and is targeted primarily at gathering information about machines running PostgreSQL, but it also works with other systems. Documentation about the script lives on a wiki page at http://bucardo.org/wiki/Boxinfo, and contributions are welcome. The development version is hosted in a Git repository. It's available under the BSD License, so anyone looking to add to the script (say, to gather information about MySQL databases...) could do so.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FLOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.