I wrote last week about figuring out which FireWire chipset is inside your computer. The technique involved single user mode, which is great if you happen to be restarting, or are investigating the innards of a brand new machine without a configured user on it. But what if you don’t want to restart, or are just curious?
Console is an application in your Utilities folder that keeps track of an organizes all the logs generated by the operating system that are stored in various locations around your computer. Some items that show up in the logs include crash information and records of kernel panics.
To get the FireWire controller information from Console, first open the program from your Utilities folder. By default, Console starts with “All Messages” as the default view. You could use the slider to manually reach the top of the list and search for the entry, or you can use the search box to scan for a certain term or phrase. If you type FireWire in the search box, you’ll see the same entry from single user mode last week, with a different date of course:
Apr 7 08:15:16 localhost kernel [0] : FireWire (OHCI) Lucent ID 5901 built-in now active, GUID 001xxx3xxxx175c60; max speed s800.