On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 12:27 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Even in less extreme situations than this, it's a fair point that often one can't run binaries from the system where you need to look at the logs, and needing special tools (rather than just any viewer or editor) to analyze those logs _is_ increased pain. Now you need a systemd-aware rescue image, not just a tinylinux livecd that's kicking around the server room
Personally the situation I've found myself in most often is trying to debug a VM guest from a RHEL6 host. I'm able to mount the guest filesystem offline with libguestfs, but having something just a journal viewer backported to EPEL would be pretty neat.
What I've been doing mostly instead to debug early boot problems is adding systemd.log_target=kmsg to the console and redirecting the console to a file.