Huge Log files

[toddb@toddbailey.net]

Hello,

A few hours ago I got a out of space warning message.
After some research I found that kern.log was some 38 gb in size and ufw.log was also quite big some 6.2 gb.

there were also some .1 and .gz files that I deleted seeing that they were rather old.

I fixed the out of space issues for now but wondering ...

are there any settings to limit the size of these and any utilities that will decode the log file entries into something a intermediate novice user can understand and possibly fix?

Also what kind of data is being stored in these log files?

[atreyu]

Hi,

The logrotate program will do that for you. It should already be installed, but perhaps it isn't, or it is misconfigured. It is run by crond, so that needs to be running (again, probably is, but you never know).

Read up on logrotate in this article and post back here if you have any troubles.

Edit: and of course, read the man page: man logrotate

[Fornhamfred]

I am running LMDE and this problem has happened several times. The previous entry is absolutely correct but as you have older files it suggests that logrotate is working. You can delete all the log files if necessary as on reboot new files will be created.

Could you please give us the output from the terminal by entering lspci.

By default in LMDE logrotate is set to weekly and should normally be fine.

If you right click the var folder and open it as administrator, then double click the log file you wish to open, then gedit or pluma should open and list the entries.

Alternatively you can open a terminal and enter sudo pluma/var/log/kern.log