Comment 4 for bug 1030836

trevor - good catch, again! ;)

collectl uses dmidecode for only one thing - if you're doing environmental monitoring with -sE, it then uses dmidecode to get the product name which is then used in a lookup table of how to interpret the ipmitool output based on the model. so the quick answer is it's fine if it can't read it and all the stats will still be correct. It also store the product name in the header of the output files as a handy reference in case you're sharing logs with someone else or looking at them on another system, which is also harmless if it can't be written.

clearly I should be trapping the error and simply setting the product name to blanks if dmidecode is not there.

I'll get that into the next release too.

-mark