Re: Linux problem resolution.

[Fritz Hayes <fhayes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is the record of the last boot, by default.   So you are correct in 
its behavior.

It does, however, show how the hardware modules and the file systems are 
being loaded without a great deal of noise.  So if corruption or flaky 
hardware is an issue, they can be seen here pretty quickly without too 
much searching.

Just a quick way to check on the basic stuff.

btw, good suggestion on the syslog modification for the kernel messages.

Fritz

David Gibbs wrote:
> 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