We are experiencing several startup problems at boot time. In our
/etc/rc.d/boot script we have "swapon -a -v &> /dev/null/' (without the
quotes). We have also added echo statements to make it visible on the
HMC during IPL. The echo statements are seen but there no messages for
the swapon command (even with the added -v). /proc/swaps shows nothing.
Our fstab has the following:
root@KDLNXT01:/etc > cat /etc/fstab
/dev/dasda1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/dasdb1 /usr ext2 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/dasdc1 /vol1 ext2 defaults 0 1
/dev/dasdd1 /vol2 ext2 defaults 0 1
/dev/dasde1 /vol3 ext2 defaults 0 1
/vol1/swap/swapfs1 swap swap defaults 0 0
# End of YaST-generated fstab lines

When I do a "swapon -a" after the IPL all swap datasets are active. My
theory is that the swapon from boot script is failing maybe because the
volumes are not fully mounted when the command is started. We have
entered it in boot.local and everything works. Questions:
#1. Is there a reason why swapon command is not working from boot
script, but works from boot.local.
#2. After the echo messages appear on the HMC console, is there a way
to make them appear in a log somewhere. I check boot.msg, warn,
messages, allmessages and grep the whole /var/log directory and found
nothing. We are also experiencing problems with samba startup.
Sometimes it starts, sometimes it doesn't. We can never find any
messages. Samba is started in our /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S91smb link. What do
I need to know to find these messages.

You are not seeing any message from the swapon command because you are redirecting the error to /dev/null. Remove the "&> /dev/null" from your command and try it again.