Tuesday, May 25, 2010  Episode #96: Hardware Death Watch  Hal's
Laptop Is Having Issues  This is pretty much a SANS instructor's
worst nightmare. I'm headed out to teach Forensics 508 in VA
Beach, and I fire up my laptop to get some work done on the
plane. The CPU fan makes a choking sound, the laptop beeps, and
the screen flashes "Fan error". Thankfully, a little gentle
coercion rendered the system bootable, but I'm clearly looking
at a complete fan failure in the near future. So I want to keep
an eye on my hardware so I can prevent an incident that involves
the magic smoke.  There are a number of different ways of
getting information about your hardware on Linux. The simplest
is probably lshw:  # lshw description: Notebook product: 7668CTO
vendor: LENOVO version: ThinkPad X61s serial: LVA9486 width: 64
bits capabilities: smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4 vsyscall64 vsyscall32
configuration: administrator_password=disabled boot=normal
chassis=notebook...  lshw provides a ton of other info on your
BIOS, CPU(s), memory, disk