On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 11:41:09AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Alfred von Campe wrote:
On a vaguely related note, I also have pondered the following in the past; if you observe a system booting, you'll see all the "[OK]" and "[FAILED]" messages. Is there a log somewhere where you can check later on which services were started and which passed or failed?
the `dmesg` command will display the kernel message buffer, which includes messages prior to syslogd starting up. also look in /var/log/messages
dmesg will only show kernel messages, as you say, so it won't help with checking [OK]/[FAILED].
Also, only those scripts that explicitly use syslog facilities (initlog(8), logger(1) or syslog(3)) will send output to syslog. All the other scripts won't, in Centos 5, as the lines that spawned initlog are all commented out in init.d/functions (don't know why).
as dmesg can eventually overflow with junk (iptables logging messages, for instance), I've been known to stuff a command like
dmesg > /var/log/dmesg.bootinto /etc/rc.d/rc.local just to keep a copy of the state of dmesg right after boot for later reference.
rc.sysinit already does that, to /var/log/dmesg.
What I usually do is change "/sbin/mingetty tty1" to "/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty1".
The contents of tty1 are available in /dev/vcs1.