Large System Logs Woes

Josh Scott · 10-16-2015, 06:47 PM

Greetings all,

I run Debian Jessie with Gnome 3.14. My /var/logs/messages file is enormous and full of this:

Code:

Oct 16 17:41:13 simplyred gnome-session[1003]: Gjs-Message: JS LOG: error reading: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

I assume it's trying to read data about my cpu temp and can't. How do I stop this?

My /var/log/user.log is huge too with the exact same error msg.

Along with this, what's the best way to keep logs purged and trimmed down to size? I noticed Debian is archiving some but I'm surprised how large it is allowing the logfiles to get. Is there a conf file somewhere to set the maximum size or something?

Thanks
Josh

arfon · 10-16-2015, 07:41 PM

Syslogd is what writes log files... Change your log settings in /etc/syslog.conf

berndbausch · 10-17-2015, 04:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Josh Scott

Along with this, what's the best way to keep logs purged and trimmed down to size? I noticed Debian is archiving some but I'm surprised how large it is allowing the logfiles to get. Is there a conf file somewhere to set the maximum size or something?

The answer to this question is logrotate with its configuration file /etc/logrotate.conf. You can configure it to rotate log files based on their size; the logrotate man page contains an example for this.

Josh Scott · 10-17-2015, 11:56 AM

Thank you so much arfon and berndbausch. I'll look at both.