How to see boot log messages

[gudmund]

Hello

I have problem with starting up a service at boot time and am struggling to really see what happens.

My server runs without a monitor and administration is done via telnet.

Does anyone know how to fetch the boot messages that is shown in console window (when a monitor is used)?
dmesg does not show the progress of the init.d scripts.
Neither does the logs in /var/logs/*.

Thanks in advance
/Gudmund

[mattst88]

one command is all you need:
dmesg

you can use it in conjunction with dmesg | grep <content to look for>

[gudmund]

Hello

Strangely, dmesg does not show all messages?Shall it be configured somehow?

Gudmund

[cs02rm0]

dmesg loops round so you only get the last n messages. Mine's 225 lines long... I've got a feeling dmesg will hold more than that though.
_________________
Rich

[transienteagle]

Peeps,

My understanding is that dmesg only reports events that affect the kernel itself. Any programs that run in user space on startup or at anytime are not reported.

To see what user space programs do on startup and to review all userspace messages you need something like bootlogd.

I'am not sure if we have an ebuild for bootlogd but the source should be readily available (just checked google....just type in bootlogd (pages of it)

rgds

TE

[gudmund]

Hello all

Thanks for your help
bootlogd worked out fine for me

Best Regards
Gudmund

[orick]

Hello Gudmund,

looking after bootlogd, I read it was in sysvinit, itself included in the baselayout package. However I did not find it in any place (except a Readme). In several places they say it should be in /etc/init.d, but it isn't.

By the way, my baselayout is up to date.

How did you get it going?

Thanks a lot,

Olivier
_________________
Olivier

[gudmund]

Hello Oliver

I think that I went to Debian and fetched sysvinit, then manually compiled
bootlogd (I looked quite a while myself to find it) and put the binary at
/usr/local/bin.

I then made a short start script (/etc/init.d/bootlogd) and stated
"before bootmisc" in the depend section (do not know if this is correct but it worked). And the issued "rc-update add bootlogd boot"

The generated logfile was quite hard to read due to a lot of unreadable characters. Maybe a result of wrongly character set somewhere on my system. But for my need it worked out fine. I found my boot problem and
have now actually disabled bootlogd (maybe it will come to use later on

Good luck

Regards
Gudmund Berggren

[nielchiano]