This post appeared originally in our sysadvent series and has been moved here following the discontinuation of the sysadvent microsite
Ever wanted to record a log of an interactive console session? Easy, just use
the script utility. It’s probably already present on your system, no
installation required.
To start recording, run script --timing=script.tim script.log. This spawns a
new shell, recording stops when you exit from it.
To replay the log, run scriptreplay script.tim script.log. It is also
possible to speed up or slow down the playback speed. For example, in order to
play back the recording at half of the original speed, use scriptreplay
script.tim script.log 0.5. Ctrl+S pauses the playback, Ctrl+Q resumes.
The nice thing about script is that it records everything that happens on the
console, it’s not just a simple log of invoked commands. If you open a text
editor like vi in the recorded session, you’ll be able to see exactly how and
where you navigate the cursor, exactly how and when text was changed -
including any typos that were later corrected, and so on.
For the full documentation, check out the manual pages script(1) and scriptreplay(1).
EL9's grubby sorting
So I had this el9 machine that had been sitting quietly waiting for updates for a bit too long. Blinded by courage, I went in and did a
dnf update, rebooted, and lo and behold, it worked without a hitch afterwards. Except just one small one: It did not automatically boot the newest kernel. I tried the standard things. Look at /etc/default/grub, look at the output of various grubby commands. To no avail. It simply would ... [continue reading]