Cleaning Out Journal Files

It's hard to believe I have reached another milestone in my life. 2024 marks the 50th year I have been involved in Information Systems, beginning way back in my freshman year of college at the University of Illinois. I will be doing a series of videos this year on stories from the past and talking about some of my experiences in the early days of computing. Today, I wanted to share a tip with you on fixing a problem I ran into with both Debian 12 and Ubuntu 23.10. My journal files were not being clear out like they had been, so I needed truncate them after copying them over to my zfs server, so I could get Lynis running again
At the end of this video I mention another script which can help keep your system clean from Joe Collins, here is the link to his video where he talks about his 'up' shell script:
• Up Gets an Update | Re...
Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:59 - Journalctl
04:55 - Run the Fix
06:17 - Recap
Hardware
Mac Mini M1 - amzn.to/3NDQj9F
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme (Daily Driver Linux) - amzn.to/3PkSYpK
AMD Rysen Machine (Currently Unplugged)
Khadas VIM 3 - amzn.to/3NjJmt3
NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano - amzn.to/3NcLpyZ
Odroid N2+
Raspberry Pi 4
Intel Nuc 10 - amzn.to/46e6l15
Intel Nuc 12 - amzn.to/3NCYxPj
Network
Aruba Instant On 1930 24-Port Gb Ethernet - amzn.to/46e6l15
Video Equipment
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Panasonic GH4 Camera
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Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Studio HD Mini - amzn.to/42JY5mt
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Audio Equipment
Shure SM7b - amzn.to/3qQ7Qm7
Universal Volt 276 - amzn.to/3Nfe9He
Software
Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack 3
Rogue Ameoba Loopback
Blackmagic Design Davinci Studio 18 - amzn.to/43ZjPMm
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Gitlab: gitlab.com/djware27
#Journal #Journalctl #Lynis

[@valsharess-yt]

Congratulations on your milestone, DJ. You have been in the industry a couple decades longer than I've been alive, and I greatly enjoy listening to your videos while I work.

[@mattvisaggio]

Thank you for sharing so much of your experience!

[@Siskiyous6]

This was a nic eNew year's gift. We do not know what we do not know. As a Linux user, but never formally trained, and never an IT person, I am well aware of the power of Linux, but do not always know how to mange it. My system was not bad, but it is better know, and I have a way to know if something is going awry.

[@esra_erimez]

Happy and Healthy New Year to you and all the DJ Ware viewers

[@CyberGizmo]

Thank you, @esra_enimez and Happy New Year to you as well!

[@guilherme5094]

👍Thanks again DJ.

[@13thravenpurple94]

Excellent video 👍 Thank you 💜

[@rorydudley7687]

Happy new year DJ! Ansible is great, but I like using a solution like Graylog to aggregate logs from all my boxes in one place.

[@CyberGizmo]

I used to use graylog, but ever since the log4J vulnerability, I am using the graphana/rlogsysd setup I talked about in a video some time back. And yeah Ansible is great been using it since 2013, it sure saves time when you have a bunch of systems you need to admin. Happy New Year to you as well @rorydudley7687!

[@rseichter]

The "journal" component is one example of why I don't like systemd. I have had better experiences with using some of the various available syslog implementation (e.g. syslog-ng) plus logrotate. This solved the task of dealing with log files for me, decades ago.

[@joshua_lee732]

Log rotate also supports journald

[@alx8439]

Journalctl allows you to configure the max log size in a very fine-grained manner so you don't need to do this regular manual maintenance thing.

[@CyberGizmo]

The point of the video was those settings were NOT working and the logs had already grown beyond the setting

[@alx8439]

@@CyberGizmo ah sorry, I missed that. It's quite strange it doesn't work for you in so many different distros. For me simple 'journalctl --vacuum-size=100M' does the job

[@CyberGizmo]

@@alx8439 You should always check your log files and never rely on automation to just "take-care-of-it". That's a mistake that in some settings could get you fired.

[@Ancipital_]

Keep an eye on your /var dir sizes, keep your logfiles short enough and use something like logrotate to automate a lot of this stuff (including backup) for non-binary logfiles. Unlike journald, most logfiles are non-binary text files. Use logrotate for those.
Happy new year DJ Ware and viewers!

[@CyberGizmo]

Happy New Year!

[@bob_mosavo]

Thanks 👍

[@Ancipital_]

Wait a second. Your pi hostname is yellowice? Is it a Raspberry Pee? LOL

[@CyberGizmo]

That would have been yellowsnow, yellowice is a flavor or ice cream....not pee...LOL

[@Namegoeshere-op9hg]

Never heard of ansible. Looks…tricky…

[@CyberGizmo]

It save a lot of time when administering a bunch of systems

[@esra_erimez]

Who's watching in 2024?