[Bug 1790205] Re: systemd journals take up too much space, aren't vacuumed automatically

[Benjamin Bach]

A month before the release of 18.04, a change was released to make
systemd journals persistent, but the setting SystemMaxUse was left unset
in /etc/systemd/journald.conf

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1618188

The bug's regression analysis seems wrong, as it states: "The journald
daemon has limits set for logs, meaning they will be rotated and
discarded and should not cause out of disk-space errors."

It also seems likely that no testers of 18.04 would discover this issue,
since it requires running out of disk space after having accumulated
large systemd journals over time.

The documentation is here:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journald.conf.html#SystemMaxUse=

SystemKeepFree could be set, since it overrides the other values listed
when the disk is running out of space. But I'm unsure, because if
running out of disk space means that all the logs are silently
truncated, then that is also a dangerous consequence on for instance a
server where you could need logs to troubleshoot why disk space is
running out...

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1790205

Title:
  systemd journals take up too much space, aren't vacuumed automatically

Status in systemd package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  After running Bionic for 3 months, I had 2.6 GB of journals.

  I would not expect from a normal desktop user that they should have to
  run commands like `sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=10d`.

  I would nominate this command as a sane default to have running at
  each reboot to ensure that logs do not exceed 500 MB:

  sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M

  Supposedly, a server should by default retain more logs, so perhaps
  this should be implemented through a configuration package "systemd-
  configuration-desktop" as a dependency of the ubuntu-desktop meta
  package?

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