Read Accumulative Operating Hours from Linux

After spending three weeks poking google with many a strange and varied sharp object, Ive finally decided to just sign up at these forums and ask:

How can I read the Accumulative Operating Hours from within Linux?

Details:
I work for an electronics recycling / data destruction company, We receive a lot of toughbooks, Our sales people like to have the operating hours to aid in pricing. Currently, we have to enter CMOS and note down the hours. it's effective, but can be slow and error prone.

Recently I started a project to replace the client portion of the disk wiping software we use because of an astounding array of technical deficiencies in the product. I would dearly love to be able to read the operating hours so we can remove this annoying step from our process.

Any help or information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.


AntonTakk

 

Welcome to the Panasonic Toughbook Forum

Myself I am not into Linux but we have many members that are. This is a question I have not heard before

slow and error prone ?? Not sure I understand. It only took me 6 seconds to see my hours...error prone?? please explain..

 

I think I have read someone else asking this.. Can't remember who.

I know getting into CMOS/BIOS takes a bit longer, BUT that process verifies that the BIOS is accessible and not password protected. A password protected BIOS drops the value of the unit and MANY customers will not buy a passworded unit.
If they get one by mistake, it WILL be returned.

I think the extra 2 minutes it takes the techs is time well spent.

 

Currently, our process for toughbooks goes like this:

For each laptop:
1.) Boot to CMOS
2.) Record SN, Operating Hours, any damaged/missing pieces (maybe 10% have damage/missing parts)
3.) Power off
4.) Move to disk wiping
5.) Connect power and rj-45 ethernet
6.) PXE boot disk wiping client

7.) Start wiping of all connected systems
8.) Record all needed information in project spreadsheet
9.) Generate / apply asset labels to each laptop
10.) disconnect and put on pallet headed to Sales

We generally do the first three steps in sets of 6 laptops (ever tried to carry 6 toughbooks at once? eek)

In practice, with the additional shuffling of the laptops, it comes out to nearly one extra minute per laptop.
One minute is still not much time. one minute * 72 laptops at a time, however, ends up eating at our speed quite badly, especially when we can do perhaps three sets of 72 laptops every day. that's perhaps enough time to get in a fourth set of laptops, MAYBE a fifth

as for the error prone part, when you have 72 lines that look like:

123456 11150 dmg net cvr
234567 22540
345678 2240
etc

It can become quite easy to mis-read something as the information gets put in to the project spreadsheet.

If the disk wiping client was able to report the hours to the server, it would save us the vast majority of that extra 72 minutes (damaged/missing parts aren't terribly common), and eliminate the majority of our 72 lines of notes

hope that clears it up

 

My custom client is already capable of reporting weather or not the user/admin passwords are set in the CMOS, it's actually pretty simple with dmidecode since that information is part of the smbios specification. but the operating hours is not, and thus is not available in the same tool

 

Sooooo. If we figure this out, you can get us good deals on Toughbooks?

 

I could try. bare minimum I can tell you which models will tend to have the lowest prices (from us) lol

 

hmmm ...
i would think that by physically entering the bios and thus being able to certify that the bios is unlocked and thus a viable machine , that this would be worth the effort .
in any event , could you break down the man-hour costs involved and what that would translate to on a per machine cost that is passed onto the customer ?
if your prices are so "tight" that a few bucks is a deal breaker on a machine , then some re-thinking is in order .

as for the code/program required ...
i have not seen a program for a 'nix distro (or even dedicated limited/specific code) that will read the bios .
i am not saying that it does not exist ... you may need to post over at the linux forums to obtain more concise answers .

 

Deleted incorrect information

 

.........................

 

Naah, I checked. I tooled around with dmidecode, biosdecode, flashrom, nvramtool and I even went so far as to scrounge around /dev/mem. There is one guy that would know where to look. But as I understand it, it's a touchy subject.

 

It's not about price/man hours. it's about the time that could be spent getting more laptops processed and ready rather than manually noting the hours for each laptop (and avoiding the human errors that can be introduced that way). A large part of our customer service to the companies we receive the systems from is based on accuracy/reporting/turn around time. Our sales people price based off the "going rate" as given by some website or service they use, and then adjust up or down based on the condition of the machine/etc (as i understand it, anyways).

I guess I can start a side project to find out where to look for it. It just so happens i met a CF-52 yesterday that falls below our resale standards due to screen defects. (and really, what else am I going to do while I wait for hard drives to wipe once my desk is loaded?)

Thanks for the feedback

 

Sell it to me for cheap.

 

"(and really, what else am I going to do while I wait for hard drives to wipe once my desk is loaded?)"

if you are completely wiping the drives (as opposed to "depersonalizing") this does consume a considerable amount of time ...
have you looked into replacing the old drive with a brand new unit ?
this can actually be cheaper and results in a faster turn around time .
(plus a new drive is a selling point)

 

This will never happen (replace HDD) because my guess this is the way the customer/client wants it done (wiped)

 

Exactly. it is one of our primary selling points, we wipe the drive to the customer's specification and make the per-machine/drive reports available to them upon request. along with a certain% of all wiped drives having forensics tools used to verify the disk wiping.