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I am experimenting with aircrack-ng and I managed to fill up / with the syslog file complaining about what I'm doing to the poor wifi card. How can I disable logging to syslog for the duration of my Bash session?. Of course I would like other, unrelated, processes to continue their logging as necessary.

The /var/log/syslog file looks like this, repeating:

Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe NetworkManager[673]: <error> [1445647180.233086] [platform/nm-linux-platform.c:2782] do_chan     ge_link(): platform-linux: do-change-link: failure changing link 4: Unspecific failure (1)
Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe wpa_supplicant[762]: Could not set interface mon0 flags (UP): Name not unique on network
Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe wpa_supplicant[762]: nl80211: Could not set interface 'mon0' UP
Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe wpa_supplicant[762]: nl80211: deinit ifname=mon0 disabled_11b_rates=0
Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe wpa_supplicant[762]: Could not set interface mon0 flags (UP): Name not unique on network
Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe wpa_supplicant[762]: WEXT: Could not set interface 'mon0' UP
Oct 24 03:39:40 loathe wpa_supplicant[762]: mon0: Failed to initialize driver interface

This is on Kubuntu 15.10.

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  • Unix, Linux, BSD, ...? syslog, syslog-ng, whatever? More info please.
    – Jan
    Oct 26, 2015 at 13:47
  • @Jan: Kubuntu is a Linux distro, pretty much Ubuntu (Debian-based) with KDE. I'm googling for the answer to the second question, but I'm not sure how to tell. The file in question is /var/log/syslog, and this distro version was released just last week so I assume that it uses the new and shiny. In fact, it is SystemD based.
    – dotancohen
    Oct 26, 2015 at 13:55
  • Maybe someone else here is familiar with the aircrack suite of tools, but if not -- seeing the relevant syslog messages would help us determine their source (and thus appropriate changes to make inside Archemar's answer)
    – Jeff Schaller ♦
    Oct 26, 2015 at 16:10
  • @JeffSchaller: Thank you, I added example log output to the question.
    – dotancohen
    Oct 26, 2015 at 16:21
  • I don't have a good way of testing ideas; does adding -qq to wpa_supplicant help any? ref: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wpa/+bug/1323089/comments/39
    – Jeff Schaller ♦
    Oct 26, 2015 at 16:49

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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syslog is system wide, so you can't disable syslog on a per session basis.

However, you can

  • copy /etc/rsyslog.conf to /tmp/rsyslog.conf
  • edit /tmp/rsyslog.conf to remove unwanted logging
  • kill rsyslogd (/etc/init.d/rsyslogd stop)
  • run rsyslogd -d -f /tmp/rsyslog.conf for the time of your "session"

at the end of the session

  • kill rsyslogd (find process with ps)
  • run rsyslog (/etc/init.d/rsyslogd start)

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