log files filled up root volume

[Stan Schymanski]

Dear all,

I hadn't rebooted my system for about a week, only used standby. At some 
point, I got a warning that there was very little space left on / and 
the system became very sluggish. Upon inspection I found that various 
log files had grown in size to 10s of GB. I thought that they would be 
removed after reboot, but I couldn't log in again. I had to boot into 
recovery console, login as root and remove some log files before I was 
able to log in again normally. Does anyone know how to prevent this from 
happening in the future? I saw that one could set a minimum space to 
leave free in journald.conf, but apparently the standard is already at 
10%, so this does not seem to have worked. I was also a bit confused 
about where this file needs to be placed so that it is actually honoured 
and also how to set that value explicitly, e.g. "SystemKeepFree=20%"?
I was also wondering if there is a way to reduce verbosity of the log 
files, as I can imagine that my system is kept busy with writing 
meaningless warning messages all the time.

Thanks for your help!

Cheers
Stan

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Dr. Stan Schymanski
ETH Zürich
Department of Environmental Systems Science
Soil and Terrestrial Environmental Physics
IBP-STEP
Universitätstrasse 16
8092 Zürich
Schweiz

Room: CHN E 50.2
Ph: +41 44 633 63 65
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