How to make whoopsie more silent (log clutter with "online"messages)

Question

I know what whoopsie is from the answers to What is the 'whoopsie' process and how can I remove it?

I do not want to stop error reporting, as I think that error reporting is the minimum a user should do to try to help Ubuntu. But since the upgrade to 13.10, whoopsie has grown up quite chatty. I have literally hundreds of messages like that in my logs:

SYS: Nov  4 14:40:48 samsung-romano whoopsie[1156]: online
SYS: Nov  4 14:41:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 4 times
SYS: Nov  4 14:42:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 2 times
SYS: Nov  4 14:43:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 2 times
SYS: Nov  4 14:44:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 2 times

% zgrep whoopsie /var/log/syslog*gz   | wc -l
773

Is there a way to tell whoopsie to be less verbose?

(the funny output format is from SLogger, a homemade program to check system log files I wrote ages ago, but this is basically the content of /var/log/syslog file).

Answer 1

Per sokai, there is no way to run whoopsie that prevents it from logging these "online" messages -- it's a bug. However, if you want to get them out of your logs, you can drop the following line into /etc/rsyslog.d/00-whoopsie.conf and the messages won't be logged anymore:

  # whoopsie generates a lot of messages of "online"
  # these are worthless and can be filtered
  if $programname == 'whoopsie' and $msg == ' online' then ~

This is pretty specific, too. If whoopsie logs something else other than " online", it will still make it to your logs.