White Paper: Initscripts & logging

Introduction

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, a systems manager needed to watch the bootup process closely. If critical system services failed, there would be no record of it, except for posthumously noting that certain services would not be running, etc. Additionally, any messages that might have explained why a service failed would be lost as soon as the boot messages scrolled off the initial console.

Unfortunately, this leads to much confusion among both the users and the support staff, as the following exchange was all too common:

Confused User: Foo isn't working!

Friendly Support Tech: What did foo say when it tried to start?

Confused User: I don't know, it scrolled by too fast. Why, is that important?

Friendly Support Tech: AAAARGH!

While designing Red Hat Linux 6.0, it was decided that this inconvenience be fixed.