Overriding / Patching Linux System Serial Number
I'm a big fan of test driven development (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode