systemd-journal

An ansible role to configure the systemd journal via journald.conf to handle all logging and more tightly limit it's log storage, suitable for an SSD on a laptop.

---
- hosts: localhost

  roles:
    - cscfi.systemd-journal

Requirements

Any systemd distribution.

Role Variables

vars:
  - systemd_journal_create_directory: True
  - systemd_journal_rsyslog_package_state: present
  - systemd_journal_storage: auto
  - systemd_journal_compress: yes
  - systemd_journal_system_max_use: 500M
  - systemd_journal_system_max_file_size: 50M
  - systemd_journal_max_retention_sec: 0
  - systemd_journal_restart_state: started

The journal will be default use as much free space as it can get and then delete old logs if other data fills a disk. That's not very friendly for SSD drives so systemd_journal_system_max_use limits this to 500M by defaut, or whatever you customise it to.

If you want to set custom options not directly supported by this role you can also overwrite systemd_journal_configuration directly.

The systemd_journal_rsyslog_package_state variable can be absent or present and if absent (not the default) the rsyslog package will be removed.

The systemd_journal_restart_state variable is started - because in many cases the restart failed on CentOS 7 even though the service was seemingly restarted.

Aug 24 09:47:02 hostname systemd-journald[22636]: Failed to set file attributes: Operation not supported
Aug 24 09:47:02 hostname systemd-journald[22636]: Failed to create new runtime journal: No such file or directory
Aug 24 09:47:02 hostname systemd-journald[22636]: Failed to set file attributes: Operation not supported
Aug 24 09:47:02 hostname systemd-journald[22636]: Failed to set file attributes: Operation not supported
[snip]
Aug 24 09:47:02 hostname systemd-journald[22636]: Assertion 'f' failed at src/journal/journal-file.c:132, function journal_file_close(). Aborting.
Aug 24 09:47:02 hostname systemd-journal[22638]: Journal started