Since it looked like bootlogd was finding and opening the console successfully I decided to discern what was different between the two machine configurations as regards bootlogd. The machine on which bootlogd works has only one hard drive, on which /var is mounted. The machine on which bootlogd was not working has /var mounted on an external USB hard drive.
I changed the location of the bootlogd logfile to the root directory with the '-l' switch (-l /bootlogd) and it had no problem writing the log file to the root directory. I had to change the 'stop' section in '/etc/init.d/bootlogd' to have it savelog the correct file(s) and everything seems to be working OK now. I still don't know why things stopped working on 5/2/07 (date of last /var/log/boot file), I didn't change the hardware configuration at all and nothing in the kernel that would affect the timing that I know of. Maybe it was just lucky to have worked the default way before, because it seems like the local filesystems get mounted later in the init process so only root could be guaranteed to be available. It seems pretty complicated but I'd hate to see bootlogd go away completely. It was a valuable aid to me as a Linux newbie to really understand what was happening at initialization time because the messages scroll by pretty fast and 'dmesg' only gives the kernel messages. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
