Find out information about installed hard- and software using the terminal without admin rights

Question

I have access to a remote server, to which I login via ssh. I don't have admin rights, but I like to find out as much as possible about the machine, among other things to see If I get what I pay for. So far I tried:

1. top (to get the size of the memory)
2. uname -a (find out more about the installed kernel,...)
3. cat /proc/cpuinfo (get information about the CPUs)
4. df -h (to find out the capacity of the harddisk)

I'm not sure If the ways I've choosen are the best. I also don't know, how this information can be manipulated by the provider or accidentally contain incorrect information. At least for the CPU's I found out, that there are still 1GHz instead of 2GHz CPU'ss on that machine (I pay for 2GHz).

Are there other ways I can use to find out information about the system, even with limited rights? (e.g. if my sever is a virtual server?). Are there benchmark tools, that don't need admin-rights to be installed?

Answer 1

you can use demsg command

dmesg can be useful when troubleshooting or to get more information about the hardware on a system.

For example

The following command lists all references to USB

dmesg | grep -i usb

The following tells dmesg to show all serial ports (which are represented by the string tty)

dmesg | grep -i tty

To know about physical memory

dmesg | grep -i memory

To show CPU

dmesg | grep -i cpu

you can get plenty of information by using this command

you can refer this file also /var/log/dmesg but the file may store your old boot message information also. The command prints only your last boot info.