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

[David C. Rankin]

On Saturday 25 July 2009 08:33:01 pm Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Dan McGee<dpmcgee at gmail.com> 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.
> 
> Nope, not logged anywhere. Those messages, however, are arch messages.
> The daemon itself that fails should write its output somewhere.
> 
> If you just want a list of what isn't running, you can always look
> in... hmm whatever the dir is... /var/run/daemons I think, and compare
> that to rc.conf.
> 
> syslogging this is acceptable if someone wants to supply a patch
> 

Thanks all,

	I found it. For some reason kdm was crapping out. Really strange. Weeks ago, I learned that kdm doesn't belong in the DAEMONS LINE and moved it to inittab. Then for some reason something changed with the 7/22 updates that caused X to respawn too fast. After the last update, the failed messages were from kdm.

	After working on it a bit more, I finally arrived at:

x:5:respawn:/opt/kde/bin/kdm -nodaemon

	and all seems to be working well now. I need to use kdm for kde3 so I maintain my kdemod3 login capability from the greeter. So far so good with this setup. Anybody else have a better way?


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
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