Webmin store log info in /etc/webmin/system-status/history

[Jeremy Davis]

IMO this is a bug, although I'm sure opinions would differ on this one. IMO nothing should be storing logging data in /etc - isn't it for config data only?

Generally this is probably not a huge issue in and of itself, but as TKL comes with both Webmin and etckeeper it makes for a HUGE amount of data stored in /etc/.git (by etckeeper) over time.

After 18mths of service an old server had amassed a massive ~550MB of data in /etc/.git! This wasn't a heavily used machine (Tracks appliance with single user) but it runs all the time and I can only assume that the files were simply from etckeeper git commits from security updates.

So ultimately I'd say this is a Webmin bug, but only becomes apparent from the combination of Webmin and etckeeper (thus making it an issue specifically for TKL).

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I'd be inclined to remap the Webmin etc data to /var/log - something like this:

mkdir /var/log/webmin
mv /etc/webmin/system-status/history /var/log/webmin
ln -s /etc/webmin/system-status/history /var/log/webmin/history

I haven't extensively tested this solution, but it seems to be working as expected. But following a reinitialisation of etckeeper, /etc/.git is back down to ~6MB which seems reasonable to me.