Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!cfctech!kevin
From: kevin@cfctech.UUCP (Kevin Darcy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: /dev/osm (was: Re: Logging console messages to a printer.)
Message-ID: <19491@cfctech.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 90 19:26:49 GMT
References: <1016@rsiatl.UUCP> <399@zok.UUCP> <1665@ctisbv.cti-software.nl> <591@ssp11.idca.tds.philips.nl> <1668@ctisbv.cti-software.nl>
Reply-To: kevin@cfctech.UUCP (Kevin Darcy)
Organization: Chrysler Financial Corp., Southfield, MI
Lines: 36

In article <1668@ctisbv.cti-software.nl> pim@cti-software.nl (Pim Zandbergen) writes:
>
>>On our AT&T 3B2 running SYS V R 3.2.1 there's a utility
>>called 'errint' for reading /dev/osm. 
>>Is this supposed to be standard in SYS V R 3.2?
>
>I was mistaking, errint(1m) reads /usr/adm/errlog which is
>filled with 'cat -u /dev/osm.all >/usr/adm/errlog', started
>from /etc/rc.
>
>The difference between /dev/osm in the 3B2 and System V/386
>is that in the first, each line is prepended with the date,
>in seconds since 1-1-1970. Errint translates this into
>readable dates, so there is no use for this program in
>System V/386.
>

Actually, the errint command on our 3.2.1 3B2's is virtually useless:
it simply *strips out* the date-in-seconds from /usr/adm/errlog, thus 
leaving no chronological information. Such information is critical to us, 
as our machines constantly regurgitate old messages, thus making many 
diagnoses virtually impossible without some sort of date-decoding (the 
Hotline provided us with a "fix" for the regurgitation problem - bombing 
the sysdump partition via mkfs every time the machine is rebooted - but 
this has failed to make a difference). We ended up writing our own log 
formatter which decodes the date.

Errint also seems to be very particular about the format of the 
/usr/adm/errlog: if your message is truncated, which happens occasionally,
errint will croak at that point.
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kevin@cfctech.UUCP		    | Kevin Darcy, Asst. Unix Systems Admin.
Soon: kevin@cfctech.cfc.com	    | CFC Technical Services 
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