Hello JDisc Friends,

recently, one of our prospects asked whether we’re able to scan FreeBSD servers. Unfortunately, the answer was no at that point in time. But our developers got interested in supporting this platform and started a quick investigation. FreeBSD is just yet another operating system of the Unix family. So they installed FreeBSD on one of our spare laptops. Luckily, there is a dmidecode port for FreeBSD and therefore getting hardware information is as easy as on Linux. However dmidecode is part of the ports project and thus is not installed by default. But compiling and installing dmidecode is just a matter of a couple of minutes.

Once we got the installation done, we started the implementation. The implementation was straight forward up to the point where we needed to get root access in order to execute dmidecode. Unlike Linux by default it is not possible to become root for ordinary users even if you know the password. The scan user must become part of the “wheel” group in order to become super user. But this is just an initial configuration task for the servers and can be automated by scripting or managing your users by some management tool.

Finding the FreeBSD specific commands for collecting the remaining information was not difficult and we got the task done within three working days. And now, we are happy to add FreeBSD to the list of operating systems supported JDisc Discovery.

So download the software and check it out!

Cheers,
Thomas