lirc is flooding the syslog with two lines each second

[Gert Brinkmann]

Hello,

in the syslog every second two lines are written:

May 1 18:05:19 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:19 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:20 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:20 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:21 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:21 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:22 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:22 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:23 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:23 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:24 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:24 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:25 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:25 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:26 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:26 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:27 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:27 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:28 flupp lircd[1323]: lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*
May 1 18:05:28 flupp lircd-0.10.0[1323]: Error: Cannot glob /sys/class/rc/rc0/input[0-9]*/event[0-9]*

This is not only annoying as it makes it difficult to use the syslog for checking the system, but also it writes too much data into the log (18MB each day). Also it keeps the hard disc awaken what is bad for standby.

Kubuntu 18.04
ii liblirc-client0:amd64 0.10.0-2 amd64 infra-red remote control support - client library
ii liblirc0:amd64 0.10.0-2 amd64 Infra-red remote control support - Run-time libraries
ii lirc 0.10.0-2 amd64 Infra-red remote control support - daemons and utils

I do not have infrared remote control hardware. But I cannot purge the packages as other packages I want to keep would be removed as well. Deactivating the services in systemd does not help (or I am doing something wrong?)

Greetings
Gert

[Gert Brinkmann (g111)]

Hello,

I have to correct myself: You can remove the lirc package without losing other packages. The problem was that I had tried to remove all three *lirc* packages. And at least one of them has some dependencies from other packages.

Greetings
Gert

[George Inman (ghinman)]

  I had this same problem
 I used sudo apt-get remove lirc
 That stoped the logs
I never installed lirc So it must have installed during upgrade to 18.04

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Indeed that problem has also been reported to Debian
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=860296

The maintainer there is not really helpful acknowledging it's an issue though and argue the users who don't have the hardware should disable/remove lirc. The component is not installed in Ubuntu by default but seems like KDE can pull it in.

Could be worth reporting upstream

[Chris (azchris)]

This problem also affects me. I am running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with MythTV, and I sometimes plug in a remote control USB. When it's not plugged in, LIRC spams the syslog. I tried to disable startup of lircd daemon but that didn't seem to work.
   sudo systemctl disable lircd.service
   sudo systemctl disable lircd.socket
and this appeared to set the links in /etc/rc2.d to be "K*lircd (kill) ) but
the glob spamming still occurred after the next reboot.

[KyL416 (kyl416)]

Same as what Chris mentioned. I occasionally use a Hauppauge 950Q USB device that has IR support on my laptop, but I don't keep it plugged in 24/7 since I frequently travel with this laptop. I don't want to mess around with scripts and disable services, so right now my "workaround" is to only install lirc when I want to use it, and uninstall it when I don't need it.

The maintainer seems to assume that all IR devices are built in and connected 24/7 since he thinks the only a bad dependency can result in lirc being installed without an IR device connected so he sees nothing wrong with the syslog being spammed with messages about it.

[Chris (azchris)]

So, now it's been two years since I first encountered this issue on 18.04.
I'm wondering if it has been fixed for 20.04 ...
based on lack of activity in this ticket I supposed it won't be fixed.
I'd like to use LIRC but I guess I'll abandon it forever since I
refuse to let it spam my SSD's syslog.

[Alec Leamas (leamas-alec)]

lirc does not spam the log if correctly configured. The repeated messages is a actually a feature since it's an easy way to detect status when configuring and hot-plugging a device.

The basic issue here is if lirc is pulled in as a dependency. It should not, it's designed to be used by users which actually have the need. The only rdepends I find in Sid is a Recommends in the vdr package. I'll file an issue about that. Once this is fixed, no-one will have lirc installed "by accident" so to speak.

For users which does not use lirc there are two options. One is to remove the package completely, this should be possible on all installations since there are no hard rdepends, just a Recommends in the vdr package.

The other is to disable lircd.socket and lircd.uinput using systemctl. This is nothing special, it's standard system service configuration.

Besides the R: lirc in the vdr package I thus still don't see any actual bug here. What *could* be considered is to add some info to the logged message about disabling services to get rid of it.

Allowing an unused service to continue to run as root without spamming the log is wrong for security and performance reasons. Hence, just writing the log message once is IMHO not a viable alternative.

[Alec Leamas (leamas-alec)]

Filed vdr issue: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1012274