[Techtalk] USB hardware question

[Laurel Fan]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 01:30:13PM -0500, Michael Carson wrote:
>      One additional question that's been bugging me is how do I tell what
> device devices plugged into the USB ports are using?  I have an MP3
> player that sometimes is /dev/sda and sometimes /dev/sdb, a serial port
> that is /dev/ttyUSB0 that took the better part of a day to find, etc.
>   It seems logical that this info should be found in /proc or /var/log/
> but heck if I can find it.  Any ideas?

I seem to remember getting this information either from the 'dmesg'
command, looking at /var/log/dmesg (which is pretty much the same
thing as the command), and in /var/log/kern.log.

Most of the logs in /var/log on your system are probably (it can vary
by distribution) controlled by syslogd.  Individual programs tell
syslogd[1] when they have something that they want logged, and then
syslogd organizes them into the log files.  syslogd figures out where
the messages go by looking at its config file, /etc/syslog.conf.
For example, I have this line in /etc/syslog.conf:
kern.*               -/var/log/kern.log
Meaning that all kernel messages should be put in /var/log/kern.log.

[1] using the syslog() function

-- 
laurel at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org