I've got problem with Handbrake/ffmpeg. After ~5 minutes transcoding, the computer locks up. I'm fairly sure it's a kernel panic because caps-lock starts flashing.
There are a few logical questions about what to do and some about specific bugs but I'm really after one thing: what happened right before everything died?!
I've checked /var/log/kern.log
and all I see around the time is me sticking in a DVD and then a few minutes later, the system booting up. No errors, no panic notice.
Is there any way to force panics to be logged? I'm fairly sure I can reproduce this (it's happened 100% of the times I've tried recently) so while I'd rather this "just worked", I'm happy enough to reboot a few times if it means I can find the cause of the panic.
Best Answer
All your system logs in Ubuntu are handled by
rsyslog
which keeps its configuration in/etc/rsyslog.conf
and/etc/rsyslog.d/
.For more information on how to configure
rsyslog
and the possible options visit thersyslog.conf man page
.Opening
/etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf
you can see that one of the lines contains*.*;auth,authpriv.none -/var/log/syslog*
Meaning that the file you are looking for in this case is any of the huge
/var/log/syslog
logs you will probably have.You can see that the file name also starts with a
-
, this means that the file is cached before writing, its great but can leave you with a bad log, what you want is that the log is written as soon as there is a problem. Remove the dash and reboot or reloadrsyslog
and then make your computer crash again, check/var/log/syslog
.