blog/data/2009-02-28-hw-support.txt

   1 Title: Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers
   2 Tags: english, nuug
   3 Date: 2009-02-28 23:50
   4
   5 <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
   6 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
   7 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
   8 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
   9 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
  10 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
  11 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
  12 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
  13 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
  14 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
  15 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
  16 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
  17 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
  18 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
  19 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
  20 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
  21 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
  22 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
  23 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
  24 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
  25 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
  26 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
  27 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
  28 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
  29 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
  30 machine.</p>
  31
  32 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
  33 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
  34 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
  35 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
  36 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
  37 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
  38 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
  39
  40 <pre>
  41 use LWP::Simple;
  42 use POSIX;
  43 use WWW::Mechanize;
  44 use Date::Parse;
  45 [...]
  46 sub get_support_info {
  47     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
  48     my $str;
  49
  50     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
  51         # fetch website from Dell support
  52         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
  53         my $webpage = get($url);
  54         return undef unless ($webpage);
  55
  56         my $daysleft = -1;
  57         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
  58         foreach my $line (@lines) {
  59             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
  60             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
  61             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
  62
  63             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
  64             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
  65             my $lastend = "";
  66             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
  67                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
  68
  69                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
  70                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
  71                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
  72                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
  73                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
  74                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
  75                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
  76             }
  77             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
  78             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
  79                 if ($lastend lt $today);
  80         }
  81     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
  82         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
  83         my $url =
  84             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
  85         $mech->get($url);
  86         my $fields = {
  87             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
  88             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
  89             'country' => 'NO',
  90             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
  91             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
  92         };
  93         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
  94                             fields      => $fields );
  95         # Next step is screen scraping
  96         my $content = $mech->content();
  97
  98         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
  99         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
 100         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
 101         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
 102
 103         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 104
 105         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
 106             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
 107                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
 108             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
 109             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 110                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
 111             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 112                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
 113
 114             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
 115
 116             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 117                 if ($end lt $today);
 118         }
 119     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
 120         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
 121         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
 122         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
 123             my $content =
 124                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
 125             if ($content) {
 126                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 127                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
 128                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
 129                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
 130
 131                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
 132                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
 133
 134                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
 135
 136                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 137                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 138                     if ($end lt $today);
 139             }
 140         }
 141     }
 142     return $str;
 143 }
 144 </pre>
 145
 146 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
 147 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
 148 from dmidecode.</p>
 149
 150 <pre>
 151 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
 152                        "447707-B21");
 153 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
 154 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
 155                        "1234567");
 156 </pre>
 157
 158 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
 159 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
 160
 161 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
 162 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
 163 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
 164 do so.</p>