Options for logging console messages

[Jeff Boyce]

Background / problem description.
I administer a RHEL3 U9 file server for a small business.  While I was out 
of town recently the server locked up and the staff rebooted it and 
everything came back up ok.  After I returned to the office I got a 
debriefing of what happened and had a chance to look through the log files 
to find any indication of what might of happened.  From talking to the 
person that rebooted the system, they stated that there were messages on the 
console that referred to a possible problem with the scsi card.  I found no 
indication of anything like this in any of the log files.  Syslog was 
sending kernel messages to /dev/console, so to gather information if the 
problem re-occurs I now have syslog also sending kernel messages to 
/var/log/console.  However, conducting some unrelated maintenance on the 
server this weekend, the server hung-up on shutting down the first time, it 
just paused indefinitely at unmounting the filesystems.  After about 10 
minutes I hit the power button to do a hard shutdown.  It rebooted just fine 
again, and suspecting that the problem was logging to a file while shutting 
down, I stopped the logging to the /var/log/console file and rebooted.  The 
server shutdown without the long pause and rebooted just fine.

Objective.
I want to keep logging kernel messages to a file in order to be able to have 
documentation of a problem like the recent one.  But I also do not want to 
have the server hang-up while shutting down, and I would like to not have to 
remember to modify and restart my syslog configuration file prior to 
rebooting the system.  Can anyone offer any suggestions for logging the 
kernel messages without having it interfere with the shutdown process.  Or, 
am I way off base here and have mis-diagnosed what happened?  Thanks.

Jeff Boyce
www.meridianenv.com