[Beowulf] Re: recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room:fullcluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Mark Hahn]

> Just be aware that dmidecode output varies considerably in quality and
> quantity.  You may found the info you need in fixed locations, but it
> may also vary over time and vendor.  Use it when it works, but don't be
> surprised if it doesn't work as well as you would hope.

sure.  dmidecode only shows you what's been programmed into the bios.
HP nodes (perhaps just replacement motherboards) seem to come with 
nulled serial numbers in bios.  I had a good head-scratch the other day
with a replaced MB that didn't have the default IPMI account/passwords.
happily, I could use the trick of booting it and running local ipmitool.

come to think of it, before I knew about dmidecode, I used to run 
strings on /dev/mem ;)

but one could probably glean other data by collecting POST messages on SOL.