🟠 High   ⏱ 5–30 min  Last verified: 19 May 2026
Affected versions: FreeBSD 14

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents
  1. Symptom & Impact
  2. Environment & Reproduction
  3. Root Cause Analysis
  4. Quick Triage
  5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
  6. Solution – Primary Fix
  7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
  8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
  9. Rollback Plan
  10. Prevention & Hardening
  11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
  12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Rapid log growth fills /var, causing service failures and write errors.

Environment & Reproduction

Seen during noisy daemon failures or debug-level logging left enabled.

df -h /var
ls -lah /var/log | sort -k5 -h

Root Cause Analysis

Unbounded log verbosity and insufficient rotation thresholds trigger disk exhaustion.

Quick Triage

Identify top log producers and stop the most disruptive source first.

du -sh /var/log/* | sort -h | tail -n 10

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Review syslog.conf, newsyslog config, and repeating error signatures.

grep -n '^[^#]' /etc/syslog.conf
grep -n '^[^#]' /etc/newsyslog.conf
Illustrative mockup for freebsd-14 — syslog_flood
Log flood consuming disk space — Illustrative mockup — Progressive Robot

Solution – Primary Fix

Reduce verbosity, trigger rotation, and restart logging safely.

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service syslogd restart
newsyslog -F
truncate -s 0 /var/log/
Illustrative mockup for freebsd-14 — syslog_rotated
Log growth controlled after tuning — Illustrative mockup — Progressive Robot

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Forward logs to centralized collector and keep local retention short.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

Disk utilization stabilizes and key services recover without write failures.

df -h /var
tail -n 50 /var/log/messages

Rollback Plan

Re-enable previous logging levels temporarily if troubleshooting data is needed.

Prevention & Hardening

Set strict newsyslog policies and alert on rapid /var consumption trends.

No space left on device, write failed in /var/log, syslogd dropped messages.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for freebsd-14.

View all freebsd-14 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

FreeBSD syslogd/newsyslog manuals and logging architecture guidance.

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