I have FC3 setup to start at level 3 - console in text mode. For some reason, leaving the console logged out causes error messages to scroll on screen as they occur. Why?

I don't won't someone to walk up to the console and see (eg) network error messages. What can I change to turn this off? Is there a good reason to leave this on?

could you post one or 2 of those messages?

I can't capture the messages since they are sitting on the console window before logged in....but since they are the same as being logged to the messages file:

IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:00:e0:81:51:99:ac:08:00 SRC=172.31.254.2 DST=255.255.255.255 LEN=328 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=128 ID=48392 PROTO=UDP SPT=67 DPT=68 LEN=308
IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:00:e0:81:51:99:ac:08:00 SRC=172.31.254.2 DST=255.255.255.255 LEN=276 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=128 ID=48998 PROTO=UDP SPT=68 DPT=67 LEN=256
IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:00:e0:81:51:99:ac:08:00 SRC=172.31.254.2 DST=255.255.255.255 LEN=328 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=128 ID=48999 PROTO=UDP SPT=67 DPT=68 LEN=308

Not that I have IPTABLES set to capture packets on my LAN card, so it's normal for these to be logged in the messages file. I'm just not clear why they also appear on the console when not logged in.

are you sure iptables is not set to log anything?
could you post any results from:
#iptables-save | grep LOG
or
#iptables-save
just in case(not both please :-) )

IPTables is a set of tools which controls Netfilter in the kernel. Thus, when you tell IPTables to log, those messages are produced by the kernel. If you look in your /etc/syslog.conf file, you will probably see a line which says:

kern.* /dev/console

which tells syslog to print kernel messages to the active console. This is why you see you iptables messages here. I believe that you can specify a log level in your iptables rule which will allow you to filter these out. Or, just remove the above line from your syslog.conf file.

I think you're close - but something is still missing. (See below) The line for kern.* has been commented out.

Do the kern.* messages default to the console even if commented out? Can I send these to /dev/null (to keep them off the console) while still having them record in messages file?

-OCG-

[root@pbx etc]# cat syslog.conf
# Log all kernel messages to the console.
# Logging much else clutters up the screen.
#kern.* /dev/console

# Log anything (except mail) of level info or higher.
# Don't log private authentication messages!
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages

# The authpriv file has restricted access.
authpriv.* /var/log/secure

# Log all the mail messages in one place.
mail.* -/var/log/maillog


# Log cron stuff
cron.* /var/log/cron

# Everybody gets emergency messages
*.emerg *

# Save news errors of level crit and higher in a special file.
uucp,news.crit /var/log/spooler

# Save boot messages also to boot.log
local7.* /var/log/boot.log