Today I notice that this blog’s disk usage is exceeding 50%.

So a maintenance is in order. One of the area that I can clean of is the logs. To check how much disk usage consumed by logs:

du -h /var/log

We can see which one consume the most:

104K    /var/log/apt                                                                                         
80K     /var/log/letsencrypt                                                                                 
4.0K    /var/log/apache2                                                                                     
32K     /var/log/mysql                                                                                       
80K     /var/log/unattended-upgrades                                                                         
44K     /var/log/exim4                                                                                       
4.0K    /var/log/samba                                                                                       
8.0K    /var/log/openvpn                                                                                     
1.1G    /var/log/journal/78571dd6ca7745fd883930edfbc1aec0                                                    
1.1G    /var/log/journal                                                                                     
880K    /var/log/nginx                                                                                       
1.2G    /var/log      

So the main culprit is /var/log/journal. But is it safe to remove the journal’s log? According to THIS, it’s perfectly safe.

With that in mind, let’s empty it out. But before deleting anything, let’s check the content:

ls /var/log/journal/78571dd6ca7745fd883930edfbc1aec0/

Looks like a number of journal files:

system.journal                                                                                               
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-0000000000000001-0005c912944622d1.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-0000000000027cda-0005c9db59ac33c2.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-000000000004f9c8-0005ca3f9fdef072.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-0000000000078054-0005ca79a740fa97.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-00000000000a1c80-0005cb04b06080bc.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-00000000000ce097-0005cb2b4509171f.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-00000000000f8e58-0005cbabe81428d7.journal                            
system@e09f493f5d9543ccac3a01a18a5a7966-0000000000124d00-0005cbdc50807f36.journal                            
user-1000.journal

Let’s remove them all:

rm /var/log/journal/78571dd6ca7745fd883930edfbc1aec0/*.journal

Now verify the disk usage after:

du -h /var/log

It’s much less now:

104K    /var/log/apt                                                                                         
80K     /var/log/letsencrypt                                                                                 
4.0K    /var/log/apache2                                                                                     
32K     /var/log/mysql                                                                                       
80K     /var/log/unattended-upgrades                                                                         
44K     /var/log/exim4                                                                                       
4.0K    /var/log/samba                                                                                       
8.0K    /var/log/openvpn                                                                                     
4.0K    /var/log/journal/78571dd6ca7745fd883930edfbc1aec0                                                    
8.0K    /var/log/journal                                                                                     
884K    /var/log/nginx                                                                                       
62M     /var/log

Looks like we can clean further /var/log. Let’s find the offending files:

ls -l -S /var/log

And the culprits are:

-rw-rw----  1 root        utmp            18732672 Aug 31 02:22 btmp.1                                       
-rw-rw----  1 root        utmp            16121472 Sep 30 01:23 btmp                                         
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm             10247924 Sep 26 02:19 mail.log.1                                   
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm              9098913 Sep 27 02:20 auth.log.1                                   
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm              2289106 Sep 30 09:19 mail.log                                     
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm              1152534 Sep 13 02:20 auth.log.3.gz                                
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm              1069630 Sep 30 09:19 auth.log                                     
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm               972616 Sep  6 02:13 mail.log.4.gz                                
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm               744907 Sep 30 02:20 syslog.1                                     
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm               659046 Sep 12 02:20 mail.log.3.gz                                
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm               518091 Sep  5 02:20 auth.log.4.gz                                
-rw-r-----  1 syslog      adm               444680 Sep 20 02:19 mail.log.2.gz

We can use rm command to clean them.

That’s all friends! I hope it helps.

Incoming Search

linux, ubuntu