On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:54:22 +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
I Beartooth wrote:
[....]
Switching the KVM switch is equivalent to unplugging all the devices
from one computer and plugging them into another. Linux will print some
messages every time you plug in or remove a USB device, but you'd have
to be switching like crazy to produce 54 GB of messages that way. I
suppose a loose cable might make it seem like all the devices are
constantly plugged in and removed, but I still don't quite see how the
log could grow that big. The excerpt you posted was 3411 characters.
Printing all of that once a second for a week would still produce only
two gigabytes.
[...]
> Finally, an hour or so ago, I tried turning the printer off
with
> its power switch. Since that time, the messages have become fewer, but
> not stopped.
I'd imagine that the messages about the printer have stopped, and the
ones about the keyboard, the mouse and the hub continue. (There's a USB
hub inside the KVM switch.) Every time you switch to another machine to
look for new messages, you cause more messages.
Right, about both; but some machines get more non-printer
messages; I don't know why.
Those messages aren't errors and you don't need to worry
about them as
long as the log doesn't grow out of control again. It's quite possible
that most of those 54 GB was something completely different that hasn't
resurfaced yet. I'd recommend doing "ls -l /var/log/messages*" now and
then to keep an eye on it, and investigate further if it grows to many
megabytes.
I fiddled a bit with the command you suggested (for which, again,
many thanks!), and eventually tried doing "$ ls -lh /var/log|less" --
which has the advantage that I need not use a terminal tab logged to root
(nor sudo). Doing that on the #1 machine (where I am now) showed a bunch
of stuff up to maybe 200K (for very few), and this :
[....]
-rw------- 1 root root 26K 2008-10-28 12:37 messages
-rw------- 1 root root 299K 2008-10-05 01:00 messages-20081005
-rw------- 1 root root 266K 2008-10-12 03:11 messages-20081012
-rw------- 1 root root 303K 2008-10-19 04:06 messages-20081019
-rw------- 1 root root 0 2008-10-27 11:08 messages-20081026
[....]
I'd like to pipe that into top, or some such, to make it display
only the files of 100K and up; but trying to read the man page for top,
as usual for powerful commands, makes me think of standing at the foot of
a huge cliff of ice.
Somewhere in this thread is a way (or maybe a couple of ways) to
skim those files without actually running through them. Maybe I can find
it again.
(I've also started skimming through root's mail; and I have to
admit a lot more of it makes sense than last time I tried.)
--
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.