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On 14.04 LTS there was a /var/log/boot.log file but this has gone on 16.04. All advice I have seen says to use systemd's journalctl command.

However...

Journalctl gives in depth syslog style log entries, what boot.log on 14.04 gave you was a log of what actually appeared on the console, i.e. <Service Name> .... [OK] or <Service Name> ....[FAIL]. It is this summary information that I wish to access on a headless server. I found this gave a very useful summary and then if something was unhappy I could investigate further. Also some daemons would only spout useful diagnostic info on the console and not in the log (maybe systemd deals with this better).

Is there such a typescript style log of console output on 16.04?

This is not a duplicate of the aforementioned query as I know about journalctl. It is that journalctl gives different information from what boot.log did (i.e. the latter logged what appeared on the console screen).

John Hobbins
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1 Answers1

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If you want to see which services failed or started, use systemctl:

$ sudo systemctl --type=service
  UNIT                        LOAD      ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTION
  accounts-daemon.service     loaded    active running Accounts Service
  acpid.service               loaded    active running ACPI event daemon
  alsa-restore.service        loaded    active exited  Save/Restore Sound Card Stat
  apparmor.service            loaded    active exited  LSB: AppArmor initialization
  atd.service                 loaded    active running Deferred execution scheduler
  avahi-daemon.service        loaded    active running Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack
  binfmt-support.service      loaded    active exited  Enable support for additiona
  cgmanager.service           loaded    active running Cgroup management daemon
  click-system-hooks.service  loaded    active exited  Run Click system-level hooks
  colord.service              loaded    active running Manage, Install and Generate
  console-setup.service       loaded    active exited  Set console font and keymap
  cron.service                loaded    active running Regular background program p
  cups-browsed.service        loaded    active running Make remote CUPS printers av
  cups.service                loaded    active running CUPS Scheduler
  dbus.service                loaded    active running D-Bus System Message Bus
  deluge-web.service          loaded    active running Deluge Bittorrent Client Web
  deluged.service             loaded    active running Deluge Bittorrent Client Dae
  ebtables.service            loaded    active exited  LSB: ebtables ruleset manage
  getty@tty1.service          loaded    active running Getty on tty1
  grub-common.service         loaded    active exited  LSB: Record successful boot

It opens in a pager by default.

If you want to see what failed during boot, again use systemctl:

$ systemctl --state=failed
  UNIT                      LOAD   ACTIVE SUB    DESCRIPTION
● var-www-archlinux.mount   loaded failed failed /var/www/archlinux
● openvpn.service           loaded failed failed OpenVPN service
● openvpn@auth-ldap.service loaded failed failed OpenVPN connection to auth-ldap
● openvpn@server.service    loaded failed failed OpenVPN connection to server

LOAD   = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB    = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.

4 loaded units listed. Pass --all to see loaded but inactive units, too.
To show all installed unit files use 'systemctl list-unit-files'.

Note that this isn't limited to just services - failed mounts, and other systemd units are also listed. You can restrict the output to a type of systemd unit using the --type option.

Also some daemons would only spout useful diagnostic info on the console and not in the log (maybe systemd deals with this better).

systemd-journald does a pretty thorough job of capturing all output from services.

muru
  • 207,228