So I am using a nas based on Debian, OMV specifically, however since I think this question is related to the underlying OS, I thought I would ask here.
My system.journal file is growing by about 1 MB/min. Now its not like I can check it every minute and see it has gone up by 1 MB. It comes in bursts. 58 MB. 10 or so min later 64 MB. And it is filled with nonsencial garbage. I have tried to tails the last 20 lines, and it clears my screen and prints nonsence. I have downloaded it and looked at the file with Windows Notepad++ and it is filled with characters identified as "NUL" There are other random characters in there as well. Here is a small snipit (it seems to look much better here then in notepad++)
:
u#h 9 w2‘4û#hÂð 9 iÔ["*jnÞ€
9 0OÈš 9 BéØ©O\@°9
R³™ã{³X9 rÿ˜LÁað9 oî¼PX¬ˆ9 à3)Æ dø9 öR±!
©î^˜9 "(…»G¯ `@9 D!DUæAe¸ 9 £&�€Ÿð€
9 ”¥‚ ñõgïp 0PT9>æ)*Æq øjg-"y§
m
RȲ*‰ÿå Ãq *Êq
MESSAGE=rrdcached plugin: rrdc_update (/var/lib/rrdcached/db/localhost/cpu-2/cpu-interrupt.rrd, [1684210457.413449:0], 1) failed: rrdcached@unix:/run/rrdcached.sock: illegal attempt to update using time 1684210457.413449 when last update time is 2632896112.000000 (minimum one second step) (status=-1)
k Å$ÿÌO=°² *Æq *Êq
_SOURCE_REALTIME_TIMESTAMP=1684210457419991  °
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:


Is this just normal? Or is, as I suspect, an issue? And any idea how to track the issue down?
A bit more details in case it matters. I place them at the bottom as people only seem to read the first very little bit and then start answering.

I have been having a bit of issues with it lately. I ended up switching kernels, and that made the log files grow MUCH faster (100 GB in a few hours) but when I realised I was using the wrong kernel, I switched back to the other one. Don't know if that matters, thought I would mention it in case.

Well, it's https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdcached.en.html , https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdtool.en.html, so it's trying to log data for display in graphs eg Cacti.
This first bit likely binary info used by the rrdtool.

So, I will repeat the question, and add a new one.

Is this normal?

And if not, how do I fix it?

Are you trying to view raw journal files? They are binary databases, well, key-value stores anyway, you should use journalctl to view them.

Yes it is likely a misconfigured rrdtool.
Check/reconfigure it!

Specifically the time. As a wild guess let's assume those cited time values are seconds since epoch. The last updated one is in 2053. The "attempt to update" one and the realtime clock are seemingly valid times today.

I agree with MadeInGermany, it is a rrdtool problem. I do not know if this is your exact problem but it may help.

https://forum.openmediavault.org/ind...603#post196603

Thank you for clarifying it was a binary file. I assumed as a log file it was text, and was somehow being corrupted. Although I have it resolved, it is important information to have for next time I need to troubleshoot something.
Yes, that did seem to be the issue. I remember finding a post on the OMV forum that lead me to delete some files related to it (I can't remember where) and that resolved the issue. Everything has been working wonderfully for several days now.
Thank you to all those that posted to assist.