I have a rackspace cloud server. How to check if it is 64 bit or 32 bit?

Question

What command do I type in to check this?

Answer 1

Is this a Linux server? If so, try uname -p

Example:

$ uname -p
x86_64

Note that this only tells you about the Linux kernel, not any particular user-land software (e.g. you can still run 32-bit MySQL on 64-bit Linux). And you could be running 32-bit Linux on a 64-bit CPU.

Answer 2

You could also check the cpuinfo and look for the "lm" (long mode) flag

less /proc/cpuinfo

output:

flags : ... lm ....

a 32-bit processor won't have this flag.

Answer 3

In addition to Matt's answer about your kernel, if you're running a Red Hat/CentOS RPM-based distro (which is what most of Rackspace is, typically) you can check the installed userland tools for their bitness with this command:

rpm -qa --queryformat='%{n}-%{v}-%{r}.%{arch}\n' | sort

You're looking for .i386 or .x86_64 on the end. It's entirely possible to have a mix of 32bit and 64bit on a 64bit install based on needs of the server.