One Machine at a Time: Building a Hardware Inventory

Why I'm building a parts inventory

I'm taking a full hardware inventory of every machine, computer and server I have running, down to the parts installed in each one. The goal is simple to state: one accurate parts inventory per machine, so each record matches what is actually inside.

This post covers one step toward that goal, for one machine. The inventory is not finished, and the pieces, meaning machine records, parts and articles, are not yet fully connected. Read this as progress on a goal rather than a finished result.

Letting the check find the hardware

For this machine, Qwen, an AI model, chose what information to collect from the system and then drafted a hardware record from what it found. Network hardware (MAC) addresses were stripped out before it drafted the record.

Letting the check find the hardware

The draft was then reviewed, and the review caught two mistakes. Qwen had mixed up the two wired network ports, and it had marked one of the storage drives as active even though that drive is not mounted. Both were corrected in the reviewed draft. At that point the draft had not been written to the website; that session only produced a reviewed record.

What the machine contains

The reviewed findings describe an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero motherboard, an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor and 62 GiB of visible memory. There are three NVIDIA graphics cards: an RTX 2080 Ti, an RTX 3090 Ti and an RTX 3090. Storage is two Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4 TB drives, one of which is not mounted.

In a separate update, the machine's existing inventory entry was brought in line with those findings. It already listed six parts. Rather than deleting them, each one was corrected in place. For example, the old entry named the motherboard as the Crosshair VIII Hero (WIFI), and it is now recorded as the Dark Hero that the check found. The other two graphics cards, the second drive, the network adapters and the case were added as separate parts.

Two items did not come from the check. Before the update, I confirmed that the 1600 W power supply and the six-GPU mining rig used as the case are installed. Together with the eleven components from the reviewed draft, that brings the machine to thirteen parts, and all thirteen are now linked to it.

What is still unknown

Some details could not be established. The exact brands and models of the power supply and case, the CPU cooler, the memory sticks (their model, count and speed) and the exact build date all remain unknown. The value stored for this machine is a historical figure, not a fresh appraisal.

Those gaps are the open items for this machine. Beyond it, the larger inventory still has to connect machine records, parts and articles. I'm continuing machine by machine, and this entry is only one step in that effort.

If you are building a similar inventory or have questions, Get in touch.