messages eat my harddisk because of alsa or pulse

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Sun Jan 25 22:52:35 UTC 2009


On Sun, 25.01.09 23:12, Tomasz Torcz (tomek at pipebreaker.pl) wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 04:10:54AM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > On Tue, 20.01.09 04:17, Muayyad AlSadi (alsadi at gmail.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > Jan 20 04:00:43 localhost pulseaudio[3021]: module-alsa-sink.c: ALSA
> > > woke us up to write new data to the device, but there wa
> > > s actually nothing to write! Most likely this is an ALSA driver bug.
> > > Please report this issue to the PulseAudio developers.
> > > 
> > > what is the reason,
> > 
> > Your ALSA driver is broken.
> > 
> > That said, I didn't expect that this message would be printed that
> > often on the setups where they happen.
> 
> 
>   What do you mean by "often"? 
> # grep -c "Most likely this is an ALSA driver bug" messages*
> messages:1
> messages-20081228:16
> messages-20090104:5
> messages-20090111:7
> messages-20090118:13

That's more how often I expected this message to be printed. However,
some folks complain about gigabytes of data like this. And that's what
I didn't expect.

But still, I think the biggest issue here is that rsyslog doesn't
enforce any kind of rate limitting and is happy to let random users
fill up /var.

This is a first-class DoS. Simply do a "cat /dev/urandom | strings |
logger" and you can make the whole system go bonkers. And it won't
even be accounted to your own disk quota. Yay.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4




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