Upstart console output not working

Question

I used Upstart's provided example for console output.

/etc/init/test.conf

console output

pre-start script

  # Perform whatever checks you like here (maybe checking
  # '/etc/default/foo' to see if the service is enabled # or not).
  #
  # if there are no problems detected, simply "exit 0", else do
  # something like this...

  # display an error message to stderr *on the console* and also write
  # the same message to the system log.
  logger -is -t "$UPSTART_JOB" "ERROR: foo!"

  # tell Upstart not to start the main process for the job.
  exit 1
end script

# this service doesn't do much :-)
exec sleep 999

And then as root

$ initctl start test
initctl: Job failed to start

The message is present in /var/log/syslog, but the message was not present in the console.

Jul 23 07:42:19 paul test[26595]: ERROR: foo!

---

How can I log errors to the console?

This is Ubuntu 14.04,

$ initctl version
init (upstart 1.12.1)

Wellfixed

Answer 1

console output writes to /dev/console, which, by default, is the system virtual logging device: it's not going to write to your personal console (e.g. /dev/tty0).

You can actually test the difference in behavior if you attempt to write directly to these virtual devices:

sudo echo test >> /dev/console     # Won't work
sudo su; echo test >> /dev/console # Works but nothing prints
sudo echo test >> /dev/tty0        # Works and prints

For more on the differences between the different virtual console devices, see this Unix StackExchange question.

If you really want, you can change what /dev/console points to by modifying your boot configuration:

# /etc/default/grub

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8"

...but if I were you, I'd just use the console log stanza instead of console output and then tail the generated file.

Pyrometer

So when the docs say display an error message to stderr *on the console*, they mean display an error message to stderr *on the sys admin's console*? I'm not sure what the utility of that would be. – Wellfixed

It's going to be to whatever console to which you've set /dev/console, which may or may not be the sys admin's console, but that's a very reasonable default: there are security implications to logging system processes in the open. – Pyrometer