Re: How to see the output of a custom init script on Lenny?

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 02:48:16PM +0100, Sander Marechal wrote:
> Ken Irving wrote:
> > A red message?  I missed the earlier part of the thread so don't know
> > what you're dealing with, but I suspect you must be in a gui environment,
> > and telling the system to shut down via a mouse click or something.
> 
> Yes. I am using the standard Debian Deskop task, so that's Gnome without
> any bootsplashes.
> 
> > The obvious problem with messages during shutdown is that, however they're
> > shown, that medium is going to vanish, so you can't sit there and browse
> > them ala dmesg after the system's turned off.
> 
> I don't need to browse them. I just need to be able to see that the
> rsync I run on shutdown or reboot is progressing or if it has stalled.
> It could output smiley faces for all I care, as long as I see something
> happening. I don't want to stare at a blank screen for 10 minutes and
> wonder whether the backup has stalled or my girlfriend has simply been
> downloading a bunch of large ISO images again.
> 
> > If you turn off your gui environment and shutdown from a console, e.g.,
> > hit Alt-F1 to go to tty1, then enter "sudo shutdown -h now" or similar, 
> > then I would think you'd see some messages there.  
> 
> Yes, then I see the messages. But I used to see those messages too when
> I simply clicked "System -> Shutdown" in Gnome. I don't have any kind of
> bootsplash. When I shutdown through Gnome I get a terminal in front of
> me with:
> 
> ---
> System is shutting down, please wait...
> ---
> 
> After that should appear messages like "shutting down gdm", "stopping
> alsa", "unmounting network filesystems", etcetera, etcetera. All the
> things that the init.d scripts say. They showed both in Etch and on my
> previous Lenny machine, but on this new Lenny system they don't show.
> 
> I hope I've explained it better now.

I don't know anything about Gnome, but a google query for 'gnome "display
shutdown messages"' (after trying some others) yielded a recent Ubuntu
list thread that seems to be about your issue.   Maybe take a look at tty7
for the init script messages?

Ken

-- 
Ken Irving