Why are they removing initlog ?

exceed1 · 09-06-2008, 07:47 AM

Hi

I just enabled initlog to run whenever any system startup script has been run so i can get the status and see if any had failed. I now see that fedora is planning to remove initlog in a future release and they label it as "deprecated".

Does anyone know why they are removing initlog from the system, it would be nice to still have an overview over the status of all system startup scripts. Is there any alternative to initlog for keeping track of if the system startup scripts were ran without problems ?

I also see that other distributions dont have much logging at all when it comes to the system startup scripts and im wondering why.

jschiwal · 09-06-2008, 08:16 AM

Please put your distro and version in your user profile. I don't know who the who in your title is supposed to be.

My system (SuSE) has an /etc/init.d/syslog service for early system logging. Reading the script, it checks for the existance of either syslog or syslog-ng. The configurations for syslog-ng is in /etc/syslog-ng/. Your system may have switched from /sbin/syslog to /sbin/syslog-ng and you are just noticing that the /etc/syslog file isn't there.

Also examine the programs and services that exist in your initrd file.
(such as blogd).

exceed1 · 09-06-2008, 03:45 PM

Hmm, thanks for you answer.

The distro and version of it was written in the first post, so i dont understand what the problem is with not having it in my profile. syslog is usually getting log entries from other programs, but i dont think initlog is using syslog at all. What initlog is logging is the status of the system startup scripts, like this output for example:
Sep 6 14:38:20 localhost smartd: smartd shutdown succeeded
Sep 6 14:38:20 localhost avahi-daemon: K02avahi-daemon shutdown succeeded
..

To make it a little more clearer, this is the output from the boot.log file in /var/log, the initlog is logging to this file and initlog is a command. This command is said to be removed in the future releases of fedora and im wondering how i then will get the same information that initlog provides. Im using rsyslogd by the way, an extended version of syslog. When it comes to syslog/rsyslog, i dont know if it can log status of the system startup scripts or maybe it can.. In case it can, what would the facility name be to set up in rsyslogd.conf be (it seems to have the identical syntax to syslog) ?

When it comes to the initrd file, do you mean the initial ram file? You cant mean that can you, Ii dont understand what kind of file you are refering to here.

So, to sum up, i have the following question:
- Why are they removing initlog, can the log entries initlog provides be received from syslog as well, if so, please tell me the facility name

jschiwal · 09-09-2008, 02:07 AM

Yes, I meant the initrd initial ram file. The first messages occur before the root filesystem is mounted and are written to a file in shared memory.

example:

Code:

inside initrd
jschiwal@hpmedia:~/temp> less /etc/init.d/boot.klog
jschiwal@hpmedia:~/temp> grep shm * -R
boot/05-blogd.sh:       > /dev/shm/initrd.msg
boot/05-blogd.sh:       ln -sf /dev/shm/initrd.msg /var/log/boot.msg
boot/02-start.sh:mkdir -m 1777 /dev/shm
boot/02-start.sh:    > /dev/shm/initrd.msg
boot/02-start.sh:    ln -sf /dev/shm/initrd.msg /var/log/boot.msg

There may be a boot.klogd script in /etc/init.d/ that cats /dev/shm/initrd.msg to

Code:

    test -s /var/log/boot.msg && mv -f /var/log/boot.msg /var/log/boot.omsg
    echo Creating /var/log/boot.msg
    if test -x /sbin/klogd ; then
        # klogd syncs out the file
        /sbin/klogd -s -o -n -f /var/log/boot.msg
        test -s /var/log/boot.msg
        rc_status -v1 -r
    elif test -x /bin/dmesg ; then
        /bin/dmesg > /var/log/boot.msg
        /bin/sync
        test -s /var/log/boot.msg
        rc_status -v1 -r

You will probably be able to find the same boot messages as you had before. Poking around and reading the services and scripts in /etc/init.d/ and inside the initrd file will probably give you the full picture.

exceed1 · 09-09-2008, 12:50 PM

thank you for the time you used to write the reply, but that seems a little too complicated instead of just using a command like initlog, but i will keep it in mind.

jschiwal · 09-10-2008, 02:56 AM

It may be complicated as far as the source of the log. But this is behind the scenes and may be occurring with initlog as well. Remember that the logging starts before the root partition is mounted. The different services that log boot commands probably do so to the same file and you only need to examine that file. It may be complicated at first examining the services to find which file will be used in the future. However once you do so, it should be easy. You could create an alias for the old initlog file that uses the less, cat or more commands to examine this file.