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

[Randy Morris]

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.