why does /var/log/journal add each NIS user

asked 2018-08-29 11:26:32 -0500

robbiethek
138 ●1 ●6 ●14

updated 2018-08-29 12:50:44 -0500

Within our /var/log/journal we have hundreds of user-####.journal files which causes problems with programs like Fail2Ban as I noted here. I have to delete all of the user-####.journal files for Fail2ban to start. When I log out and log back in I see 111 8 MB journal files re-created. Is there a way to configure this? Not sure if NIS is related to this or not.

We are on Fedora 28.

answered 2018-08-31 05:17:47 -0500

muep
870 ●5 ●23 ●24

That fail2ban issue sounds like a bug in fail2ban. But regardless,

Journald by default will store logs from processes of a user in files owned by the user. That way, the user can have access to examining their own logs without necessarily having privileges to seeing those of other users or of system services.

If you do not need this capability and prefer having all journal content in the same files regardless of the originating user, you can specify SplitMode=None in the Journal section of the /etc/systemd/journald.conf configuration file.

Your configuration file will possibly have more content, but this content /etc/systemd/journald.conf would suffice for telling Journald to not split up messages to different files based on the user id:

[Journal]
Storage=persistent
SplitMode=none

Run man journald.conf for more details.

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Very helpful! As far as I can tell, the long alphanumeric of the /'var/log/journal path should stay persistent after a reboot and is based off of /etc/machine-id. There doesn't seem to be a way to exclude users, so it appears that a user log is generated for all users with a login in /etc/passwd. With NIS that's several hundred. One of the maintainers of Fail2ban posted a workaround to use a path to the systemd journal or journalflags. The former is working at least.

robbiethek ( 2018-08-31 09:22:49 -0500 )edit

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