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I want to find place to where Linux writes all boot messages. You know:

facility one    [STARTED]
facility two    [STARTED]
facility three  [FAILED]

I serched with 

find . -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i "words from boot messages"

in /var/log/, but not found any thing...

I have CentOS 5.5.
For example at boot time I had: "Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable?"
I don't care about error specificaly, but I can't find any log that holds this error.
When I do dmesg | grep "no link present" I get nothing

Thank you for ahead.

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Most of the boot messages are put in a buffer, that you can access using the command "dmesg". On most Linux distributions, that output is also stored in /var/log/dmesg.log.

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For example, I had at boot time: "Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present Check cable?" I don't care about this error specificaly, but when I do: dmesg | grep "no link present" I get nothing... Actually I get VERY MUCH lines with grep "eth0", but not with concrete error. So is there way to find concrete boot errors description or no? (Thank you for reply to the point) – Rodnower Aug 15 '10 at 20:43
up vote 1 down vote

Every exceptional entry during boot is placed in /var/log/syslog Could also be in /var/log/boot.msg

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I have CentOS 5.5 and I have no syslog in /var/log/ – Rodnower Aug 15 '10 at 20:22
boot.log (generally boot.log(x) where x is positive integer or nothing) is empty. – Rodnower Aug 15 '10 at 20:51
Try /var/log/messages – pjc50 Nov 17 '11 at 16:42
up vote 1 down vote

This solution surely works on Debian systems, but maybe can be useful anyway.

In order to store all the messages shown during the boot you have to start a service called bootlogd, after the next reboot you can read the messages in /var/log/boot.

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