brltty floods both syslog and daemon.log

[pbwhonix]

just done a fresh import appliance in Virtualbox of both the gateway and desktop. Upon completion, had a look around and found that both the /var/log/syslog and daemon.log files were filling up very rapidly with error messages pertaining to brltty. Not knowning what this was, found out it is a package for braille support for console messages. Unfortunately, it spits out about 10 lines of text, every 5 seconds, in both log files. The error is:

file system mount error: usbfs[brltty-usbfs] -> /var/run/brltty/usbfs: No such device

Wouldn’t take long for the system to run out of space at this rate.

I disabled brltty with both “systemctl stop brltty” and “systemctl disable brltty”, which stopped the flood of error messages. Just want to check I haven’t broken the system and that brltty has some other purpose I wasn’t aware of???

cheers.

[Ego]

Good day,

As a general purpose recommendation, you shouldn’t change things you don’t fully understand. However, in this specific case, there seems to be no disadvantage for the systems security, as far as I’m concerned. Looking at it myself, this seems to be indeed an issue happening on standard-installations of Whonix, presumably due to a lack of an USB-Interface.

Because of this, it might be a good idea to deactivate the feature in the next version of Whonix altogether, if no problems arise from its removal.

Have a nice day,

Ego

[Patrick]

The original reason was to install accessibility tools by default:
https://phabricator.whonix.org/T457

Lucky, that something (logrotate?) seems to set a capacity on that log. Otherwise we’d have users run out of disk space already a long time ago.

ls -lh /var/log/syslog

Ask workaround (need to apply this only once):

sudo systemctl stop brltty
sudo systemctl mask brltty

[Patrick]

/var/log/syslog spam host brltty[204]: file system mount error: usbfs[brltty-usbfs] -> /var/run/brltty/usbfs: No such device:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=845496

[pbwhonix]

Thanks Patrick.