dmesg not working on new system

[Chris Maness]

>
> Is /var/run/dmesg.boot populated correctly? 
Yes
> What kinds of things are in the -a output? 
named error messages mostly (this is a name server)
> Same results booting with or without network attached? 
Haven't tried, but there are no messages displayed by dmesg (without a 
flag) at the time
> (asking because busy network w/ lots of system messages seems to be 
> what's flushing the buffer for me).