Is there a log for all the bootup messages?
 

If I have the following text during bootup,

* Initializing modules... [ok]
* Cleaning up ifupdown... [ok]
* Loading modules... [ok]
*Setting the system clock. [ok]..
* Setting up LVM Volume Groups... [ok]
*Starting Enterprise Volume Management System... [ok]
*Checking all file systems... [ok]
.
.
.
* Starting Comon Unix Printing system: cupsd [fail]
Starting OpenLDAP: running BDB recovery, slad - failed
The operation failed but no output was produced.
* Starting Samba daemons... [ok]
* Starging web server (Apache2)... [fail]

Is there a log for all these messages? I check with dmesg, but it does not have the all the output. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, it does not have a log of the status of all the daemons (ok or fail).

Thanks !

PS. running on Debian Linux if that helps :)

Usually /var/log/messages

or /var/log/syslog or for the really initial stuff, you usually have to do dmesg:

eg:

#dmesg > myfile.txt

look in myfile.txt for the output.

The dmesg output is only messages generated by the kernel. The starting whatever [ok] like messages are generated by init, which is the first user level process started when the system is booted (it had PID 1 and all other user level processes, i.e. not kernel threads, are descendents of init). Offhand, I don't think init logs the failure or success messages anywhere, but it would be a useful thing. You can simply check your /etc/rc.d directory for the list of files to see what is being started on boot and then check what is actually running. To do this you'll need to understand how SysVInit works -- Googling around should help, but basically for most systems look at the symlinks in the /etc/rc.d/rcN.d directory, where N is the runlevel you boot into. The links that start with S are services to start when the system enters the runlevel.