[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#423528: Problem seems to have been caused by wierd timing issue with external USB hard drive

[Dominique Brazziel]

Since it looked like bootlogd was finding and opening the console
successfully I decided to discern what was different between the 
two machine configurations as regards bootlogd.  The machine on which
bootlogd works has only one hard drive, on which /var is mounted.
The machine on which bootlogd was not working has /var mounted on an
external USB hard drive.  

I changed the location of the bootlogd logfile to the root directory
with the '-l' switch (-l /bootlogd) and it had no problem writing the 
log file to the root directory.  I had to change the 'stop' section in
'/etc/init.d/bootlogd' to have it savelog the correct file(s) and
everything seems to be working OK now.

I still don't know why things stopped working on 5/2/07 (date of last
/var/log/boot file), I didn't change the hardware configuration at all
and nothing in the kernel that would affect the timing that I know of.
Maybe it was just lucky to have worked the default way before, because
it seems like the local filesystems get mounted later in the init
process so only root could be guaranteed to be available.

It seems pretty complicated but I'd hate to see bootlogd go away
completely.  It was a valuable aid to me as a Linux newbie to really
understand what was happening at initialization time because the
messages scroll by pretty fast and 'dmesg' only gives the kernel
messages.