On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 10:22:39PM +0000, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > 
> That comes back to the question of the purpose.  I, for example, want
> to be able to read battery serial numbers, so I can track their
> performance over time via envstat.  
> 

Broadly, the benefit I can see is that you can pull out the hardware
platform information.  With respect, this probably does not mean much
to the hobby or small network user who can probably reel off the build
of their machines from memory but in a larger, distributed network it
can be really handy when the finance fixed assets people want to know
exactly what machines are in the company.

Not that it is really a case for allowing this for an unprivileged
user but for people with a recent Solaris 10 machine should have a
look at what you can get from the prtfru(1M) command.

-- 
Brett Lymn
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