[arch-general] Where can I find the "boot" log to find out what failed on boot?

[Dwight Schauer]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Randy Morris<randy.morris at archlinux.us> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 05:29:31PM -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 4:49 PM, David C.
>> Rankin<drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
>> > Listmates,
>> >
>> >        Seems like a simple question, but I've searched /var/log and
>> > can't find a file that contains the boot history showing all the
>> > "fail" messages during boot. For some reason after the latest
>> > update, my i686 box showed a half dozen or so "fail" messages. I
>> > need to find the log of what died.
>> >
>> >        The upside to this? This was my i686 box that would no longer
>> > start kde after the next-previous set of updates. Now kde4 starts
>> > fine again.
>> >
>> >        Whatever failed can't be that critical because the box is
>> > functioning fine, but I still want to find out what failed. If the
>> > file is in /var/log, then I just flat missed it. I thought it would
>> > be daemons.log, but I found no fail messages.
>>
>> This might not actually be logged anywhere now that I think about it.
>> To devs- am I wrong, or maybe we should add some syslog foo in here so
>> this stuff is more easily traceable?
>>
>> I personally disable the VC on tty1 in inittab on all machines so that
>> no console overwrites the boot screen.
>>
>> -Dan
>
> That's an interesting way to handle that Dan.  Personally if I'm
> troubleshooting this, I add something like "read KEY" to the end of
> /etc/rc.local so that the boot pauses for a keypress.  After I see what
> I want, I just comment out or remove that line from /etc/rc.local.
>
> Another way would be to remove the string escape that clears the screen
> from /etc/issue, but IMHO that is quite ugly.
>

I disable vc/1 on all my machines in inittab as well, and have been
doing for over a year now on all my arch installs. It is one of the
first things I do after installing, and I just leave it disabled.