Ubuntu Syslog Spam

Astro | MDX | Tailwind

There’s a really annoying issue in Ubuntu 24 LTS where the system update-notifier process spams /var/log/syslog with no end of messages like:

[13465:0100/000000.837732:ERROR:zygote_linux.cc(249)] Error reading message from browser: Socket operation on non-socket (88)

This can consume all available disk space with hours, which can then prevent you starting new processes, or even from logging in.

Immediate Fix

If you suspect you have the issue, this can be revealed by:

df -h                       ## are you at 99% disk usage?
du -hac /var/log/syslog*    ## syslog using crazy space?

An immediate fix is sudo truncate -s 0 /var/log/*, which is a bit drastic, but likely to allow you to carry on working.

Preventative Fix

To stop this from happening (until the issue is fixed), you can create a config file under /etc/rsyslog.d.

These are numbered by priority, with a higher number having higher precedence. The default config file is /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf, so create a file like /etc/rsyslog.d/49-ignore-update-notifier.conf to turn off logging from update-notifier:

:programname, isequal, "update-notifier.desktop" stop
:programname, isequal, "update-notifier-crash" stop

Additional benefit of this fix is that it stops the messages from being written to disk, rather than other fixes that just clear the messages up afterwards.

Extra Fixes

Additionally: