Capturing server information with UNIX - reporting functions on multiple servers Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Capturing server information with UNIX

For the Oracle DBA who performs reporting functions on multiple servers, capturing the server name is very important. This is especially true in cases where several databases with the same name exist in several servers, and the report must show the server name to properly identify the database.
The most common command to gather server information is the uname –a command. Here is an example of the output from this command in Solaris UNIX.

root> uname -a
SunOS goofy 5.8 Generic_103634-03 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-80

Here is the uname –a command on a HP/UX server:
root> uname -a

HP-UX penguin B.10.20 A 9000/871 2639229148 two-user license
Here we see that the first column is the UNIX dialect (SonOS, HP-UX), the server name (goofy, penguin), the version of the OS, the serial number of the server, and miscellaneous server information.
If we just need the server name for an Oracle report, we can extend the uname –a command to capture the server name by using the awk utility and parsing-out the first column of output:

root> uname -a|awk '{ print $2 }'
goofy

UNIX also provides the hostname command to display the server name.

root> hostname
goofy

The above is an excerpt from the "Oracle9i UNIX Administration Handbook" by Oracle press, authored by Donald K. Burleson.