[Syslog-ng-maintainers] Bug#982918: syslog-ng: tty10 is not a device under LXC causing a normal file to be written for d_console_all

[John Kristoff]

Package: syslog-ng
Version: 3.19.1-5
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

The Debian syslog-ng.conf contains the following:

  # Virtual console.
  #
  destination d_console_all { file(`tty10`); };

Normally this works fine.  However, under LXC there are only a small
number of tty devices available.  Therefore, syslog-ng will write to
a standard file /dev/tty10 instead of the block device.  Further, LXC
by default allocates a relatively small amount of partition space to
/dev, approximately 500 KB, so /dev/tty10 will quickly grow to consume
all available /dev space rendering syslog-ng from logging at all once
that situation arises.

This issue was detailed in a blog post here:

  <https://www.claudiokuenzler.com/blog/988/syslog-ng-lxc-container-no-space-left-on-device-dev>

The blog post author suggested changing tty10 to tty2, but the syslog-ng
upstream maintainer suggested just removing tty10 config altogether:

  <https://lists.balabit.hu/pipermail/syslog-ng/2021-February/026182.html>

This configuration statement appears to have introduced as far back as
3.1.0-1:

  syslog-ng (3.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
  * Fix path of syslog logfile (closes: #575722) and use tty10
    instead of vc/10 to log on console.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.7
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-13-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages syslog-ng depends on:
ii  syslog-ng-core         3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-mongodb  3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-sql      3.19.1-5

Versions of packages syslog-ng recommends:
ii  syslog-ng-mod-add-contextual-data  3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-amqp                 3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-examples             3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-extra                3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-geoip                3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-geoip2               3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-getent               3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-graphite             3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-journal              3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-map-value-pairs      3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-pacctformat          3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-python               3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-redis                3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-riemann              3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-smtp                 3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-snmptrapd-parser     3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-stardate             3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-stomp                3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-tag-parser           3.19.1-5
ii  syslog-ng-mod-xml-parser           3.19.1-5

syslog-ng suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information