/dev/osm (was: Re: Logging console messages to a printer.)

[Pim Zandbergen]

bobr at idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (Bob Rinne) writes:

Bob>The OSM minor numbers are:
Bob>	0 - read device that never returns EOF... therefore anything
Bob>	    that reads it will always be reading till a signal occurs.
Bob>	1 - reads current contents of buffer and returns EOF.
Bob>	2 - read device that never returns EOF, but starts from the
Bob>	    beginning of the circular buffer instead of the logical
Bob>	    "current" position.

Bob>If you don't want to do the mknod by hand everytime you reboot put
Bob>the following in the file /etc/conf/node.d/osm...

Bob>osm	osm.0	c	0
Bob>osm	osm.1	c	1
Bob>osm	osm.2	c	2

On the 3B2 these are called /dev/osm.all /dev/osm.cur and /dev/osm,
respectively.

Me>On our AT&T 3B2 running SYS V R 3.2.1 there's a utility
Me>called 'errint' for reading /dev/osm. 
Me>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.

Bob>Nope, nothing in any of the V.3.x release from AT&T so I doubt if it
Bob>would be in any 386/ix release.  "cat" will work although it works on
Bob>BUFSIZ boundaries ... This means up to BUFSIZ bytes will not be in
Bob>the log file.

I suppose 'cat -u' will do. Still a pity you can't find out when
the message has been printed on the console.
-- 
Pim Zandbergen                           domain : pim at cti-software.nl
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