Red Hat

Disclaimer: It has been approximately 7 years since I used Linux regularly. However, I would be surprised if any of what follows is no longer applicable.

You should be aware that dmesg simply prints out the contents of a kernel log buffer. It is a ring buffer and it's not very large. New messages overwrite older ones once the buffer has been filled. If your kernel is feeling chatty, you could very well miss messages if you depend on dmesg.

dmesg can be convenient to check the latest kernel messages, but I would not consider it a comprehensive reporting tool in and of itself. For that you need to look elsewhere.

For example, soon after booting a linux machine, dmesg will print out all the startup messages spat out by the kernel during its initialization and hardware detection routines. Try dmesg a day later (or a minute later if the kernel has encountered some issue) and it's possible that the boot messages are now gone (they should still be available in a log file, even if they've been overwritten in the kernel buffer read by dmesg).

Regards,
Alister

alister thanks for your informative answer.

dmesg seems not to be what I was hoping it was. I guess RHEL just doesn't have this functionality. I have been doing a lot more Red Hat stuff lately and a lot of stuff seemed easier to do then on the Solaris server I normally work on. I just thought if Solaris can do it surly RHEL can do it too. I guess not.

Anyway I never asked how to get the faults or errors from the hardware I am using, only can RHEL access the info and if so how. The RHEL server is on a Sun Blade so there are two ways to get to the info. One way is thought the Lights out manager and the other is console port.

fpmurphy I looked into the lm-sensors program but I don't like installing 3rd party stuff and prefer native OS tools if possible. Thanks for helping me though.

Anyway thanks for everyones input.

lm-sensors should be available from the Red Hat repositories, and is as much 3rd party stuff as bash, Perl, Apache, or NFS. Each of these tools is made by different people, and at most 1% of those is employed by Red Hat. Not even the kernel is made by Red Hat, they're contributing to it, but the main work they do is package all this software together and glue it together.

Yes I know lm_sensors is in the repositories I checked. I also saw that I have some files to configure to get it to work. That would take more work then I am willing to put into it at this time. I will just use the Lights out Manager for now.

I understand that most of the Linux stuff is made by other people other then Red Hat. If the package/software is not part of the standard build I have to get special permission from security to install it. I'm mainly a UNIX admin and I don't want to add any programs that may not be needed and that I will have to secure later.

Thanks for your help. Maybe I can be of help to you guys at a later time.

The reason that Solaris can give you that information is that the hardware and the software are being provided by the same vendor. Linux runs on commodity equipment, which has many different parts. It would be foolish to assume that the same integration exists, but using the tools from your manufacturer will allow you to do the same things, as they should provide you with the integration tools to check hardware, etc.