Once you login to a new server the first thing to do especially if it is a server you never logged in is to check basic things as Kernel version with:
root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# uname -a;
Linux jeremiah 4.9.0-8-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u4 (2018-08-21) x86_64 GNU/Linux
Check remote server hardware configuration with tools as
# dmidecode
# lshw
For more check my previous article Get Hardware System Information on Linux
or directly checking things in proc with commands such as:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
or directly use some custom script such as system_state.sh –
Next good thing to do is to check Linux install date:
And finally do check the exact codename of Linux on remote server, in the past in many Linux distros this was possible by checking /etc/issue and ./etc/issue.net files, now on Debian based distributions Ubuntu / Debian / Mint this can be achieved with:
root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 (stretch)
Release: 9.5
Codename: stretch