# Retrieving board information

The primary way to identify each board to NMS OAM is by its board name. As shown in the following illustration, the NMS OAM service provides several functions to retrieve information about a board, given a board name. If the name is not known, other functions are provided to retrieve the name of a board based on other information about the board.

## Retrieving the name of a board

To retrieve the name of a board from a configuration database, pass any of the following information to the appropriate oamBoardLookupBy XXX function, along with the context handle to the host where the board is installed and managed by NMS OAM:

- PCI bus and slot

- Driver ID number

- Number

- Serial number

- Product type

- MAC address (Ethernet boards only)

- Shelf and slot (CompactPCI CG boards in PICMG 2.1-compliant chassis only)

Note: Not all of this information may be available for a given board.

The function returns a buffer containing the name of the board.

You can retrieve the names of all boards in the database, using oamBoardEnum. With the function invocation, pass an index value, starting at 0 and continuing until the function returns OAMERR_NOT_FOUND. A board name is returned with each invocation.

For more information about these functions, refer to Board information retrieval functions.

## Retrieving other board information

Once you retrieve the name of a board, you can retrieve any other information about the board using the appropriate oamBoardGet XXX function. Pass the name of the board to this function, along with the context handle to the resource host containing the board.