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Re: Certbot excessive logging



On Sat, 11 Feb 2017 at 19:46:25 +0100, Gunter Königsmann wrote:
> > Feb 10 00:00:01 systemd[1]: Starting Certbot...
> > Feb 10 00:41:37 systemd[1]: Started Certbot.
> > Feb 10 12:00:01 systemd[1]: Starting Certbot...
> > Feb 10 12:29:38 systemd[1]: Started Certbot.
> >
> My question now would be if the information that certbot is still
> running as it should be might be worth one message every 12 hours.

It's a systemd timer unit (systemd's equivalent of cron jobs). systemd
doesn't know or care what Certbot does, it just knows that it has
started a unit; so it logs about it, just like it logs all actions that
it carries out. You'll notice these messages come from systemd itself,
not from Certbot.

cron logs to syslog too - on my system, at least once per hour. You're
probably only not seeing messages like this because you are filtering them
with logcheck or similar:

Feb 11 19:17:01 illusion CRON[431]: (root) CMD (   cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)

Whatever filtering you are doing to not be annoyed by those messages,
I suggest applying the same filtering to systemd periodically starting
Certbot. Alternatively, you could reduce systemd.log_level on the kernel
command line, or set [Manager] LogLevel in /etc/systemd/system.conf, to
make systemd stop logging those messages in the first place.

(In answer to the obvious question, yes, there is some redundancy between
timer units and cron; the systemd-cron package resolves that redundancy
by creating timer units from (ana)cron configuration.)

    S


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