Finding the serial number of your ACT system

When contacting support, it’s best to find the serial number of your ACT system and have it handy when you open a ticket via the website, via email, or when calling in.  Providing the serial number allows us to quickly look up your system, and see the configuration of your system which is often relevant to a support request, even when it does not seem so.  There are a few ways to find the serial number, whether you are physically near the system or are offsite.

ACT serial numbers are a six-digit number starting with three, e.g. 3xxxxx.  If a number you’ve found has a different format, then you may be looking at the order number, or another number that is not an ACT serial number.

Finding serial numbers on physical systems

The systems themselves have serial numbers in a number of different places.  On the front side of systems, if it is a compute node and some types of other nodes, there will be a pull-out card with the serial number on it.  For systems without a pull out card, there is usually a serial number on the top of the chassis near the front.  Since this will be obscured by systems above it in the rack, the next step is to check the back of the system.

At the back of the rack, systems which have serial number stickers on them will be somewhere on the back of the chassis facing the back of the rack.  They will not be on the top or sides of the chassis, so moving the system will not be required.  On Intel compute blocks, the serial number stickers are wrapped around the node’s handle.

Workstations have a single serial number on the back of the system, with the system name, the serial number, and a bar code of the serial number.

Finding serial numbers remotely

If the cluster is remote and it is not practical to physically look at the system in question, then there are a couple of other ways to get the serial number.  If the system is part of a cluster, then the serial number is in /act/etc/act_nodes.conf.  The first field is the system hostname, and the second field is the serial number.  Simply grep the hostname from the file to find the serial number.  For example:

[act@head ~]$ grep node01 /act/etc/act_nodes.conf
node01    312345    en0=1c:b7:2c:00:00:01,en1=1c:b7:2c:00:00:02,ipmi1=1c:b7:2c:00:00:03,ipmi8=1c:b7:2c:00:00:04

In this case, the serial number is 312345.

Another way you can find the serial number is to login to the User Portal and find your system in there.  From the main menu, go to Systems, and find your system in the list.  Beware of multiple systems with the same hostnames but different serial numbers.  (This is why we encourage our customers to choose a unique hostname for all machines, and provide them to us to facilitate identifying the correct system in support cases.  We can change hostnames in our system for you at any time.)