Messages on shutting down

[Kelly L. Fulks]

Mark Fraser wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 January 2008 19:42:43 Donn wrote:
>>> Are these messages logged anywhere
>>> so I can read them when I next boot up and find out what's causing them
>>> in the first place?
>> You can try:
>> /var/log/messages
>> Poke around in /var/log too
>>
> 
> That didn't show much, but I managed to get some of the messages with a 
> digital camera:
> 
> Starting Clamav virus database updater freshclam
> Starting DirMngr dirmngr
> Starting NFS common utilities
> Exporting directories for NFS kernel daemon...
> Starting NFS kernel daemon
> Starting internet superserver inetd
> Starting powernowd...
> Starting Samba daemons
> Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon avahi-daemon
> Starting DHCP D-Bus daemon dhcdbd
> Starting Bluetooth services
> Starting anac(h)ronistic cron anacron
> Starting deferred execution scheduler atd
> Starting periodic command scheduler crond
> Enabling additional executable binary formats binfmt-support
> Checking battery state...
> Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local)
> Stopping K Display Manager: kdm
> 
> I think they all have [ok] at the end too, which is what I would normally 
> expect to see at start up and not shutting down.
> 
> 

The message that are displayed (if there were no splash) are displayed
on tty8.  This tty can be reached with <CTRL><ALT><F8>.  What you are
seeing is the screens flipping around to get everything setup for proper
shutdown.  The system opens tty8 for writing, when KDM stops (see the
last line above), that tty takes control of the system.  The splash
screen then is run and it covers tty8.

Since the last thing written to tty8 was the start up messages, when the
screen flips, you will see exactly what you are seeing.  The start-up
messages for the init scripts which ran at the last boot.

On my system (running gutsy), they are written to /var/log/boot, as
Ranmadhu pointed out they should be (it works properly on my system).
However, there are some control characters written to that file as well.
 It appears that what is writing to /var/log/boot is exactly what is
written to the screen and thus the control characters.

I hope that this helps.

-- 
Kelly L. Fulks
Home Account
near Huntsville, AL