Where Linux places the messages of boot?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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