Halt logging all together?

SUPPORT QUESTIONS
1

Was curious if I could halt all logging or reduce just to the lowest verbosity for tailscale on my raspberry pi, reducing writes is kind of important to increase the longevity of the SD card and I tailescaled is a firehose of information.

Adding VERBOSE=0 to /etc/default/tailscaled doesn’t seem to do much.

Context is that this recently bit me as my log files filled up the SD card and tailscaled then shut down making the system inaccessible. Luckily, I still had zerotier running and was able to log into the device to fix otherwise I would’ve been in trouble as this device is on another continent.

As a potential workaround out of band of Tailscale, I’ve gone into /etc/systemd/journald.conf and set the following:

[Journal]
SystemMaxUse=1G

Which will hopefully keep things in check at a higher level.

2

Yeah, VERBOSE=0 doesn’t do anything. Zero is the default. VERBOSE controls how extra verbose it is.

In addition to systemd-journald writing to the SD card, tailscaled also writes to disk itself. You can set $STATE_DIRECTORY to a tmpfs-mount to keep that in memory.

And for systemd-journald, you can set:

[Journal]
Storage=volatile

With both, your SD card won’t be written to, but logs might get lost on power failure.

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