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I have been reading as much as I can about this problem but I am under deadline pressure (the only time these problems seem to occur). None of the answers on similar questions provide much clarity. I did the same steps as this person:

18.04 low disk space - using 640GB and more in /var/log/syslog.1

My Syslog is 148 Gb!!

The system is brand new - I built all of it from scratch only 2 weeks ago, which also marks the period of time I have experience with Ubuntu.

  1. The System disk is 256 GB NVRAM
  2. I have assigned 32 Gb for virtual RAM
  3. I have a 2TB external drive most files
  4. I have a "Workbench" Folder on my Desktop for some active files. (Running at 33 GB).
  5. I am primarily using Blender, with MB-lab (recently) and some very large environments. Also Makehuman has been used over the last couple of days.

The computer has been running (hard) almost continuously...so it has not been restarted. Could this be a reason why the Syslog is large?

I have tried:

  1. df -h. Everything looks as it should except that the System disk is full.
  2. Busybody - but I don't understand what it is doing...it is processing triggers for man-db and systemd.
  3. Restarting the system.
  4. NB. I have not dug into logrotator, but from what I have read this is automatically part of the OS.
  5. I attempted to open the syslog and apart from normal looking entries intially my page just went solid black...like to government is onto me or something.
  6. I am currently copying across the syslog to the my large storage HDD and then I will delete it, restart and see what happens.

The system is Ryzen 2700, 16 GB RAM, RTX 2060, Latest Ubuntu 20.04.

I would have preferred to contribute my experience on one of the other active threads, but that isn't how this forum works. I would really like to know what could be causing my syslog to suck the life out of my machine. Using Blender for Fluid caches and Rendering perhaps?

DrIgnatiusCole
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1 Answers1

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I would really like to know what could be causing my syslog to suck the life out of my machine.

tail -f /var/log/syslog

and look for repeated lines. If those are errors fix the error. If those are warnings check what program those are from an change the log level of that program.

And -after- that do a 

sudo > /var/log/syslog

to empty the file.

I attempted to open the syslog and apart from normal looking entries intially my page just went solid black...like to government is onto me or something.

Do not use an editor or something that will try to read the whole file. Use tail, less , or more.

Rinzwind
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  • Thank you very much - this has really helped. The tail threw up NXDOMAIN errors, "mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001"...which seems to be a common enough problem. The Linux machine is acting as a server to 2 other computers sharing the one drive in order to centralise work. It is also interacting with a NAS - and it maybe the combination that is causing problems as I am exchanging a lot of data and individual files. – DrIgnatiusCole Jun 07 '20 at 16:07
  • Also - according to the "more" command, logrotate succeeded at midnight last night. There was one warning from the gnome shell warning of a buggy client sent a "net active window" message. But I really can't see anything that points to anything very strange. Also the sudo > /var/log/syslog did not work - permission denied....I AM the adminstrator (obviously)...not sure why. Be great to get input on that too otherwise I am off to research that. – DrIgnatiusCole Jun 07 '20 at 16:12
  • not /car/ ... /var/ ;) Thing is syslog holds notifications, warnings AND errors. is syslog in /var/log/ with names like syslog.1 or syslog.1.gz? If not... logrotate is not picking up syslog. – Rinzwind Jun 07 '20 at 16:16
  • YEs - I know "var"....that was merely a typo. And yes, syslog.1 is decent size as is syslog.1.gz. Just the syslog that is mental. Is there anything wrong with just deleting it and restarting? Surely the OS will just start a fresh one? – DrIgnatiusCole Jun 07 '20 at 16:24
  • no don't delete, use the "> syslog" method. do a sudo -i , password, cd /var/log/ and then > syslog if the 1st one didn't do it – Rinzwind Jun 07 '20 at 16:26
  • Thankyou so much for your help Rinzwind - that got the job done. I held off doing a straght delete in the hope you would point me. I am going to save this URL for future in case this happens again. Again many many thanks. – DrIgnatiusCole Jun 08 '20 at 07:18