Allow Custom System Vendor and Product Name Override in Settings

[d19dotca]

Problem

Some VPS and dedicated server providers (OVH in my case) ship servers with placeholder DMI/SMBIOS information that shows as "To Be Filled By O.E.M." in the Server page of Cloudron. This information is read from /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/ and cannot be changed at the OS level since it's stored in read-only firmware. This results in some annoyances in the Server page when reviewing the details.

Current display in Cloudron Server page:

• System Vendor: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
• Product Name: To Be Filled By O.E.M.

Proposed Solution

Add optional configuration fields to allow administrators to override the system vendor and product name displayed in Cloudron's Server page. This can help not only in allowing us to be more technically accurate, but also could be used by admins for quickly identifying prod vs stage servers, or the type of Cloudron server that's running if managing multiple for example.

Proposals:

Option 1: Configuration File

Add optional fields to a Cloudron config file, for example /home/yellowtent/platformdata/configs/system.json:

{
  "systemVendorOverride": "OVH",
  "productNameOverride": "SYS-GAME-2"
}

Option 2: Settings UI

Add fields in System → Settings or Server:

• Custom System Vendor (optional)
• Custom Product Name (optional)

If these fields are populated, use them instead of the DMI values.

Option 3: Environment Variables

Allow setting via environment variables:

CLOUDRON_SYSTEM_VENDOR="OVH"
CLOUDRON_PRODUCT_NAME="SYS-GAME-2"

My preference would be option #2 above that's only editable by administrators.

Code Reference

The relevant code is in system.js in the getInfo() function:

async function getInfo() {
    // ... existing code ...
    
    const sysVendor = safe.fs.readFileSync('/sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/sys_vendor', 'utf8') || '';
    const productName = safe.fs.readFileSync('/sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_name', 'utf8') || '';
    
    // ... existing code ...
    
    return {
        sysVendor: sysVendor.trim(),
        productName: productName.trim() || productFamily.trim(),
        // ... other fields ...
    };
}

Benefits

1. Cosmetic Improvement: Server page displays meaningful information
2. Multi-server Management: Easier to identify servers when managing multiple Cloudron instances
3. No Breaking Changes: Optional feature, defaults to current behavior

This is related in part to https://forum.cloudron.io/post/81065. Between OVH's indifference to setting these BIOS firmware attributes, and my mild OCD... lol, I'm hoping we can add this as a small nice-to-have improvement for users.

[james]

Hello @d19dotca
I like your proposal.
Option 2 is the best one in my opinion.
Then this would also get an API Endpoint and enables set and get with the API.

[girish]

The intent of the page is to expose what is in the hardware/OS. I think you should ask OVH to set these values, maybe. We could make a new field entirely for a user to set, like server description, but the existing values should not be over writable.

(Thing of it as akin to CPU name/OS name/OS version etc. These are not meant to be 'customized' or touched by the user).

[d19dotca]

@girish , I guess I look at it from the perspective of... if the host/vendor didn't bother to set up those details in the firmware of the BIOS, then why does it show in the System view for Cloudron? At that point, it's just unnecessary noise, isn't it? How does To Be Filled By O.E.M. help a Cloudron administrator looking at the Server page?

I like the idea of being able to customize it as some users may find that helpful, however I'm certainly not fixated on it, so maybe instead of being able to customize it (if you prefer it not be customized), we could at least remove it/hide it from view when the value is the default/unset To Be Filled By O.E.M.?

I just dislike seeing those lines in there when they're not helpful because the vendor (OVH in my case) didn't set them in the firmware of the BIOS, and they're likely not willing to either. I had opened a case with them a couple of years back I think asking them to set it (thinking it was mistakenly overlooked), but they said because all their servers are basically custom built, they don't set those on their dedicated servers. I imagine it may not apply to all, but does for at least some of the dedicated servers OVH sells. I have to imagine OVH isn't the only one either selling dedicated servers without values set for product and vendor.

In my case, I wanted to set it the way I felt they should be set (Vendor = OVHcloud, Product = SYS-GAME-2), but if that's not desired by the community then maybe at least hiding it when it's unhelpful (i.e. the default/unset value) could be nice so that it doesn't seem like it's incorrectly configured.

Hopefully that makes sense.