How do you tell if you're running on 32-bit or 64-bit hardware?

While the command uname -a will show wether you are using a 32-bit or 64-bit Operating System (as well as possibly looking at /etc/*release), it won't tell you if your hardware is actually 64-bit or not.

Murphy walks among us. You know Murphy, the famous "optimist" who helps make every bad situations even worse? Well, after a disaster has occurred is not the time to figure out how and where you need to recover your data. Sure, we practice (ok, hopefully we practice!) recovering our database(s) from tape or disk. And during our testing we restore it into a test database or, if we’re lucky enough, into a test server. Great, but how does the application connect to the recovered database if we’ve run into a massive hardware (server) failure?

For computers to talk on a network, they need a unique address.  The most common type of address is an Internet Protocol, or IP, address.  The address consists of a network portion and a device (computer) portion.  I use the term "device" only because it could be something other than a computer, like a printer.  It isn’t critical to understanding IP Addresses that there is a separate network portion and a separate device portion, but it does become important when you to want to understand how data moves across your personal network and across the internet.

There are a variety of ways to determine which version of SQL Server you are running. While the @@version information will tell you the current version
SELECT @@version
SELECT LTRIM(RIGHT(LEFT(@@VERSION,38),9))

The following code will as well, and in a slightly different format:
SELECT 'SQL Server '

 After adding a network card (NIC or Network Interface Card) to an OpenSuSE system, and configuring the device with YaST, I could not get it to activate.  After a reboot it also didn’t show up as an active interface.