How do you do a survey of a Linux machine to collect fundamental information about it and the network environment?

I'm stepping out of the scope of my expertise a little bit to help a friend. My friend supports a Windows network for a client, and there's one Linux box. I agreed to go on site and take a look to see what I could see. What they're interested in, for the near term, is joining the Linux box to the Windows domain, saving files from the Linux box to the Windows file server, and connecting an HP Laser Printer that HP doesn't support on Linux. I want to do a good survey, though, so if things come up later I can have information to go by while looking up solutions before going back on site.

So, I'm asking if you can please help me develop a checklist for going in and documenting the Linux machine and relevant information about the Windows environment. All that I have to go by is that the Linux box "might be Red Hat."

Thanks!

You might want to look at the sitar package. It comes with SuSE if that is the distro you are using.

Am I asking the wrong question? Do people who sit down at a new box that they've taken charge of maintaining just wing it or is there a method for cataloging the system's state and capabilities.

"uname -a" will give details about the kernel, the host name and generally the architecture (ie: i386, x86_64...).

If it is redhat, then "cat /etc/redhat-release" should give you information about the version of the distro. Other distros have something similar, such as /etc/debian_version.

"cat /proc/cpuinfo" will give info about the cpu installed and "cat /proc/meminfo" will give details about the memory.

"df -h" will give the used / available disk space on each mounted partition.

Other than that, what do you need to know?

--Ian

documenting the Linux machine
Maybe first read up on auditing a bit? I prefer Tiger and Servdoc. Tiger runs a security audit of the box which is kinda neat for pinpointing problems that should be dealt with quickly. Servdoc, well, here's an example report. Top that off with either Chkrootkit or Rootkit Hunter just in case. And if the box was not well-maintained and running publicly accessable services you best compile and install tools elsewhere, put them on removable media, access them from there and write the logs there as well. If you encounter any anomalies it would be good to run more thorough checks, preferably from a Live CD.


and relevant information about the Windows environment" part
Sorry. Wrong forum. ClippyOS' home is /General.