console-kit-daemon errors

This document (7005003) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
s390x

Situation

Whenever /etc/init.d/dbus is run during a reboot or via cron job or using rcdbus restart, warnings appear in the messages file from console-kit-daemon:

Nov  3 06:31:15 sles11 console-kit-daemon[6919]: WARNING: Could not determine active console
Nov  3 06:31:15 sles11 console-kit-daemon[6919]: WARNING: Error waiting for native console 1 activation: Invalid argument
Nov  3 06:31:15 sles11 console-kit-daemon[6919]: WARNING: Error waiting for native console 2 activation: Invalid argument
...
Nov  3 06:31:15 sles11 console-kit-daemon[6919]: WARNING: Error waiting for native console 61 activation: Invalid argument
Nov  3 06:31:15 sles11 console-kit-daemon[6919]: WARNING: Error waiting for native console 62 activation: Invalid argument

These are caused when the daemon attempts to send ioctls to VTs which don't exist in the s390 architecture.

Resolution

These messages are cosmetic and can be ignored. If you want to stop these messages from filling up your logs, you can modify the the syslog-ng.conf file to supress the messages.

add:
filter f_ignore   { match('console-kit-daemon.*Error waiting for native console') or match('console-kit-daemon.*Could not determine active console'); };

modify:
filter f_messages   { not facility(news, mail) and not filter(f_iptables); };
filter f_warn       { level(warn, err, crit) and not filter(f_iptables); };

to

filter f_messages   { not facility(news, mail) and not filter(f_iptables) and not filter(f_ignore); };
filter f_warn       { level(warn, err, crit) and not filter(f_iptables) and not filter(f_ignore); };

Note that glib will still print the error to the screen but they will no longer appear in the syslog.

Disclaimer

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