Re: Linux problem resolution.

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fritz Hayes wrote:
> Also, look at the dmesg log file in the same location (tail 
> /var/log/dmesg -n 500).  It will provide the bootup details and help to 
> id what might have broken.

Is dmesg a true log file?

>From what I can see, on my Fedora core 4 system, the dmesg log file is
created in rc.sysinit by executing 'dmesg -s 131072 > /var/log/dmesg'.
And, upon investigation, /var/log/dmesg on my system only showed the
dmesg output from my last boot, not the current activity.

One thing to make sure of ... in your /etc/syslogd.conf, make sure your
messages log entry does *NOT* have a minus sign in front of the
filename.  A minus sign tells the syslog daemon not to sync the file
system after writing the log entry.  So if the system panics there's no
guarantee that the data has been written out to disk.

FWIW: I have an entry in syslogd.conf that logs all kernel messages to a
separate log file: kern.*  /var/log/kernel, just to be safe.

david