Console displaying old messages only

I'm having the exact same problem. My console for "All Messages" or "Console Messages" will only show messages for June 8-9, but each says that it has 4000 messages.

Did you hit the reload button in the console?
It could be a log jam
In a terminal, enter
ls -al /var/log | grep Jun
which will give you all the logs created this month.
Important are the secure and system logs.
Also run
ls -al /var/log | grep out
which should show you the latest maintenance logs
There should be three of these
daily.out
monthly.out
weekly.out

If the logs are up-to-date, then we have to look elsewhere.
In the Finder, locate the file
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Console.plist
and drag it onto the desktop and reboot.
That might fix things.

BTW, ~ refers to your home directory.

Reload has no effect.

The logs in /var/log are still updating, and if I look at system.log in Console I see new entries. It seems to be the "All Messages" and "Console Messages" under LOG DATABASE QUERIES that are the problem.

Moving com.apple.Console.plist didn't fix the problem either.

caerthann wrote:
It seems to be the "All Messages" and "Console Messages" under LOG DATABASE QUERIES that are the problem.

Those logs do not have a corresponding log file, instead they are handled by the ASL database. Let's see what has happened to yours: copy and paste the following into the Terminal window followed by a return:

ls -al /var/log/asl*

Copy and paste the results from the Terminal window to a post here.

The full results would be pages long. Here's an excerpt:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 770589 Jun 26 07:58 2009.06.25.asl
-rw-r----- 1 root admin 1037 Jun 26 21:31 2009.06.26.U0.G80.asl
-rw------- 1 root wheel 3482 Jun 26 18:16 2009.06.26.U0.asl
-rw------- 1 heather wheel 33481 Jun 26 21:45 2009.06.26.U502.asl
-rw------- 1 _securityagent wheel 2214 Jun 26 12:37 2009.06.26.U92.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1138562 Jun 27 06:23 2009.06.26.asl
-rw------- 1 heather wheel 6169 Jun 27 17:04 2009.06.27.U502.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 108104 Jun 28 07:40 2009.06.27.asl
-rw-r----- 1 root admin 694 Jun 28 19:05 2009.06.28.U0.G80.asl
-rw------- 1 heather wheel 35199 Jun 28 21:34 2009.06.28.U502.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 121680 Jun 29 08:04 2009.06.28.asl
-rw------- 1 heather wheel 36584 Jun 29 18:34 2009.06.29.U502.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 56328 Jun 30 06:17 2009.06.29.asl
-rw------- 1 heather wheel 16244 Jun 30 14:22 2009.06.30.U502.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 51432 Jun 30 14:30 2009.06.30.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 13878 Mar 14 09:06 LongTTL.U0.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 47361 Apr 16 20:05 LongTTL.asl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 4190 Mar 13 18:01 LongTTL.asl.1236606759
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 8 Jun 30 14:30 StoreData
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 14 09:06 SweepStore

caerthann wrote:
The full results would be pages long.

Hmm, mine only go back 3 days, whereas what you posted already covers 5 days. This might be because of a restart, but that seems unlikely.

Otherwise, the permissions on those files look OK. But those are all in the "/var/log/asl/" subdirectory: what of the "/var/log/asl.db" file itself? Wht do you get from

ls -l /var/log/asl.db

Ah ha. I get this:

ls: /var/log/asl.db: No such file or directory

caerthann wrote:
Ah ha. I get this:

ls: /var/log/asl.db: No such file or directory

Well, looking again at mine, it hasn't been used since January 19th, and my "All Messages" in Console start where that finished. This is odd, since it doesn't seem to correspond to any particular System update.

You can easily give yourself an empty asl.db file with the correct permissions:

sudo >| /var/log/asl.db
sudo chmod 600 /var/log/asl.db
sudo chown root:wheel /var/log/asl.db

although I doubt this will help if it is no longer used, as I suspect.

I'll need to think some more on this.

I had a similar problem on my MBP.

I got Console to work properly by deleting everything in /var/log/asl folder.

You may have to restart afterwards.

charlie