showing system's health on /dev/tty1 - GNU/Linux

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freem
Nixers
Hello.

I am growing tired of /dev/tty1 showing a boot sequence which is... useless.

It is useless because, basically, it spits a lot of lines, that no-one will ever be able to read (yes, even with the --noclear option of getty).
Also, in practice, my system starts services in parallel (with runit) and most of the logs are redirected to svlogd, which means several things:

1) gettys are initialized far _before_ the system is completely up and running (especially network interfaces)
2) you don't know if something is wrong except if if's so wrong that you can't login or other similar big issues

So, I had the idea of using /dev/tty1 to *not* be used as a login manager (you know, the usual line in ~/.profile: `test $(tty) = /dev/tty1 && exec xinit`) but for showing a quick health summary.
What I would need is a tool which can show:

* (only "bad"?) lines in dmesg
* daemons' status and their age (so that one can know if they are trying to boot every few seconds)
* system's uptime
* system's NICs and IPs
* system's hostname

Constraints:

* run the checks either in real time or with reasonably slow delay
* minimal dependencies, especially in terms of daemons already being up and running (obviously: the goal is to be able to quickly see what is wrong when something is)

Ideally, it would work with any POSIX system and only be "active" when the TTY it runs on is actually displayed (I know it's doable) but those are just ideal stuff, not mandatoty (I could hack my way in there if necessary).

Anyone knows such tool (if I write such a tool myself, it will likely be a statically linkable C++ application using linux's framebuffer's API, which means that would not run on non-linux kernels)?


Messages In This Thread
showing system's health on /dev/tty1 - by freem - 17-12-2020, 08:45 AM