title: Ubuntu: large syslog and kern.log files
body: <p>Logging into my Ubuntu machine, I get a warning that I am running out of disk space. Tracing back, I find that it is the syslogs, especially the kern.log(s) that are eating up my 1TB disk. </p>
  
  <pre><code>-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 240G Feb 25 14:22 kern.log
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 516G Feb 21 07:59 kern.log.1
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 1.1K Feb 15 07:39 kern.log.2.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm  19K Feb  7 07:56 kern.log.3.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm  37K Feb  1 07:45 kern.log.4.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm  23G Feb 25 14:52 syslog
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm  25G Feb 25 08:11 syslog.1
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 1.6G Feb 24 07:49 syslog.2.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 1.7G Feb 23 08:18 syslog.3.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 3.4G Feb 22 08:19 syslog.4.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 3.6G Feb 21 07:59 syslog.5.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 6.9G Feb 20 07:38 syslog.6.gz
  -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 7.3G Feb 19 07:36 syslog.7.gz
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>From the snippet above, you can easily find that kern.log and kern.log.1 is eating up 80% of my 1TB disk. I can get the space by deleting the files, but I think it won't solve the problem.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have an idea on what the issue might be?
  I saw that you can get the logging level by:</p>
  
  <pre><code>cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I get</p>
  
  <pre><code>4    4    1    7
  </code></pre>