[plug] inittab respawn

[Matt Kemner]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Robert Andrews wrote:

> As I said before I understand that it is not possable to see boot up
> messages on a terminal that does not exits

You can configure linux to use a serial console, so boot messages are sent
down the serial port instead.

> Also issueing init q on my terminal does not display the errors messages
> that are displayed on the "actual linux terminal'

Have a read of the syslog manual page, and configure syslog up to do what
you want.  It is certainly possible to have init's errors sent to a
logfile, because they are sent to /var/log/daemon.log by default on
Debian.

If you wish to see every single error message on every single console when
you are logged in (and not just as root)

add this line to your /etc/syslog.conf:

*.*					*

This will get very tiresome very quickly though, especially when you are
in the middle of editing some file and you keep getting syslog messages
printed over the top of your terminal.  A better idea is to send it to a
file

*.*					/var/log/everything.log

and then run "tail -f /var/log/everything.log" from the terminal you want
to read this from.

Even better would be to work out exactly what errors you want to see, and
what you don't, and configure syslog appropriately.
For example I have an "xconsole" open permanently which receives these
logs:

daemon.*;mail.*;news.none;*.=debug;*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;cron.none;local7.none    |/dev/xconsole

but what you find important will no doubt be very different to what I find
important.

> I have also checked dmesg the errors are not displayed there iether

dmesg is for kernel errors only.  Syslog handles most everything else

 - Matt