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My X login manager (slim) has brought with it a dependency on a package consolekit I don't know what consolekit is good for, other login managers such as wdm do not need it.

But anyway, the problem I am having is that consolekit is logging lots of garbage in /var/log/ConsoleKit/history. I am not interested in those logs. Is it possible to disable logging?

I have tried removing the log file and creating a symlink to /dev/null

ln -s /dev/null /var/log/ConsoleKit/history

But that does not work, because consolekit now complains that there are too many levels of symbolic links.

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ConsoleKit doesn't accept symbolic links for the log file as you mentioned in your question.

But you can trick consolekit a bit, when you create a null device instead of a normal log file. First remove the history file:

rm /var/log/ConsoleKit/history

And then use this command:

mknod /var/log/ConsoleKit/history c 1 3

That creates a null device (c: character special, 1: major number and 3 minor number).

Now, everthing that is logged in this file is deleted and needs no space on the filesystem.

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  • so basically, this will create a second /dev/null file, named /var/log/ConsoleKit/history ? I have /var partition mounted with nodev option, will this still work? Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 16:45
  • @MartinVegter This will end in a Permissin denied when writing to this device. But, there is stil another option: a bind mount. Before creating the null device, run this command: mount --bind $(mktemp -d) /var/log/ConsoleKit/. Then create the device as in my answer. You can test with echo "blah" >/var/log/ConsoleKit/history which should not fail in a permissin error. Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 17:03
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From FreeDesktop.Org

ConsoleKit is a framework for defining and tracking users, login sessions, and seats.

Also note:

ConsoleKit is currently not actively maintained. The focus has shifted to the built-in seat/user/session management of Software/systemd called systemd-logind!

Documentation

No longer maintained but available here

To disable it, see:
console-kit-daemon Hogging CPU and RAM or
Gentoo Wiki: Consolekit

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Make the log file immutable as root.

sudo echo "" > /var/log/ConsoleKit/history/<log_filename>
sudo chattr +i /var/log/ConsoleKit/history/<log_filename>
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