Hi, I have a specific question about slackware boot up sequence. What I want to know is when the logs (in /var/log/) are used for the first time.

The thing is I made a partition which I mount as /dev/md7 in /mnt/md7, and I use this partition to hold /var/log and /var/www. I also made symbolic links from /var/log to /mnt/md7/log and from /var/www to /mnt/md7/www.

I want to make sure this partition is mounted on time to get everything (specially the logs) going without errors. My logs seem to be fine, but I want to make sure about this.

This is my /etc/fstab file:

/dev/md0 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/md1 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/md2 /boot reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/md3 /var reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/md4 /tmp reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/md5 /home reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/md6 /usr reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/md7 /mnt/md7 reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0


Thanks in advance!

You should be fine. If syslog begins with the same output that dmesg outputs at boot, then you know you have captured everything right from the beginning.

If you have
# Save the contents of 'dmesg':
/bin/dmesg -s 65536 > /var/log/dmesg

in /etc/rc.M (It is just after the 'Set the hostname' section on my system), you can compare.

you might also want to take a look at /etc/syslog.conf and figure out what it does.

tobyl

syslogging starts pretty late in the boot script. But you need /var mounted before then. In fact just after all non-root partitions in fstab are mounted (and swapon is run) in rc.S. The first call to /var is to cleanup temp files and then utmp is also created. This means that var should be mounted early. If var is to be mounted on a partition other than '/' you need to mount that partition first in your fstab, before mounting var on that. This will make sure that everything is straight.

Oh ok, I thought the logs were initially stored in a ring-buffer so that logging started even if /var was not mounted immediately.

tobyl

The messages from the kernel *are* buffered and get written to dmesg. The messages from the init scripts are different. Note that the two kinds of messages are usually mixed in the output to console just after mounting the root partition. Drivers from the kernel may still be registering and reporting while console messages from the init scripts have already started. Starting logging is one of the last things done during bootup.