We frequently talk here about how Paglo indexes all of your IT infrastructure. We also talk about how to construct various kinds of queries to interrogate that data.

This post is a little different in that I want to cover a happy little use of Paglo to answer a question I had about one of my machines.

I am going to perform a re-install of one of my FreeBSD machines and needed to buy a new disk. But the machine has been around for so long that I could not recall if it was using a SATA or PATA disk. I was not at a convenient location to log in and start poking around, however a Paglo tab in my browser is always convenient.

In to the Paglo search box I typed the query:

matsubue ata

Where “matsubue” is the name of the host I wanted to check, and I was looking for any asset or log file that matches ‘ata.’ That query might have been too broad but narrowing queries is very easy.

This returned:

By going to the ‘tool’ menu I selected ‘show details’ which gave me the contents of the ‘dmesg.boot’ which looked promising and there was my answer:

atapci0: nVidia nForce3 Pro UDMA133 controller> port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xf900-0xf90f at device 8.0 on pci0
ata0: ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata0: [ITHREAD]
ata1: ATA channel 1> on atapci0
ata1: [ITHREAD]
atapci1: nVidia nForce3 Pro SATA150 controller> port 0x9f0-0x9f7,0xbf0-0xbf3,0x970-0x977,0xb70-0xb73,0xf400-0xf40f,0xf300-0xf37f irq 23 at device 10.0 on pci0
atapci1: [ITHREAD]
ata2: ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata2: [ITHREAD]
ata3: ATA channel 1> on atapci1
ata3: [ITHREAD]
...
ad4: 238475MB Seagate ST3250824AS 3.AAD> at ata2-master SATA150

So this system was using a SATA disk. Question answered.

Sure this information is available if you can log in to the machine in question and look at the dmesg.boot file yourself. However that sort of remote access is not always readily available. Paglo’s indexing of my FreeBSD machines, combined with its search index of that data, and its web based UI made this a very quick and painless search.