Persistent journalling is enabled and you must guarantee that the journal never occupies more than 200 MB under /var/log/journal. Which setting in /etc/systemd/journald.conf enforces that ceiling?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 108. Essential system services medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct SystemMaxUse=200M
Correct. It caps the total disk space the persistent journal under /var/log/journal may consume; journald deletes the oldest archived files to stay under it.
Not correct RuntimeMaxUse=200M
Wrong location. The Runtime settings govern the volatile journal in /run/log/journal, which lives in memory and is lost at reboot.
Not correct SystemKeepFree=200M
Wrong sense. That reserves 200 MB of free space on the filesystem for everyone else; it constrains the journal only indirectly and does not put a fixed ceiling on it.
Not correct MaxFileSec=200M
Wrong unit and wrong scope. MaxFileSec is a time, not a size, and it forces rotation of an individual journal file after that interval regardless of how large it has grown.
Why
Each limit exists in a System and a Runtime variant, one for /var/log/journal and one for /run/log/journal, and the defaults are proportional — 10 percent of the filesystem, bounded by the KeepFree reserve. The settings take effect after `systemctl restart systemd-journald`, and are applied when files rotate, so an already oversized journal is trimmed then or immediately with `journalctl --vacuum-size=200M`. Sizes accept K, M, G suffixes.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page journald.conf(5)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 108 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- You corrected the running system's clock with `date -s`, but after the next power cycle the machine came back with the old wrong time. Which command copies the corrected system clock into the hardware (RTC) clock? machine-checked
- On a systemd-based distribution, which file determines the local time zone used by the C library when formatting times? machine-checked
- A host runs chrony as its NTP client. Which command shows the list of time sources chrony is currently talking to and how it rates each one? machine-checked
- In /etc/ntp.conf you find the line `server 0.pool.ntp.org iburst`. What does the `iburst` keyword do? machine-checked
- A minimal systemd host synchronises its clock with systemd-timesyncd. Which statement about that service is accurate? machine-checked
- On a systemd host, type the single command that turns on automatic network time synchronisation (do not include a path). machine-checked