what kind of machine am I

[karl.kleinpaste at osc.edu]

At OSU CIS, all officially-supported machines have a file /etc/sysinfo
which contains various bits of system-specific information, e.g.,

pyr:/vmunix:bsd4.3:osx4.4c:/bin/hostname

which in general reads as

architecture:/KernelName:WhatItLooksLike:WhatVendorCallsIt:HowToGetHostname

This is trivially parsed in everyone's .cshrc files so you can then
move on from there.  We set this up over 3 years ago when the
department was first beginning to purchase large numbers of
workstations and other disparate hardware.  It works very well and is
only a minor maintenance headache.  Most discless Sun clients, for
example, have only a symlink /etc/sysinfo -> /usr/local/sysinfo and
then those clients which break the "pattern" for that server have
their own, real /etc/sysinfo.

--karl