Bug#1014298: mate-screensaver appears to spam auth.log with thousands of messages a minute

[Derek Roberts]

Package: mate-screensaver
Version: 1.24.1-1
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,


* What led up to the situation?

As far as I can tell there is no obvious thing that led up to this situation.
At 13:25 today it appears mate-screensaver started creating these log messages:

Jul 3 13:25:54 b3 dbus-daemon[3399]: [session uid=0 pid=3399] Rejected: destination has a full message queue, 0 matched rules; type="signal", sender="(unset)" ((bus)) interface="org.freedesktop.DBus" member="NameOwnerChanged" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.freedesktop.DBus" (uid=0 pid=3616 comm="mate-screensaver ")

by 15:29 there were over 750,000 copies of this error message in the log

Jul 3 15:29:59 b3 dbus-daemon[3399]: [session uid=0 pid=3399] Rejected: destination has a full message queue, 0 matched rules; type="signal", sender="(unset)" ((bus)) interface="org.freedesktop.DBus" member="NameOwnerChanged" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.freedesktop.DBus" (uid=0 pid=3616 comm="mate-screensaver ")


* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)?

I was able to stop the messages by killing mate-screensaver

* What was the outcome of this action?

Messages have stopped. but I'm not sure what process is starting the screensaver or how to stop this happening again

If left for a few more hours, my /root partition would fill and the system would be difficult to recover.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.3
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-15-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages mate-screensaver depends on:
ii dbus-x11 1.12.20-2
ii libc6 2.31-13+deb11u3
ii libcairo2 1.16.0-5
ii libdbus-1-3 1.12.20-2
ii libdbus-glib-1-2 0.110-6
ii libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 2.40.2-2
ii libgl1 1.3.2-1
ii libglib2.0-0 2.66.8-1
ii libgtk-3-0 3.24.24-4+deb11u2
ii libmate-desktop-2-17 1.24.1-2
ii libmate-menu2 1.24.1-1
ii libmatekbd4 1.24.1-1
ii libnotify4 0.7.9-3
ii libpam0g 1.4.0-9+deb11u1
ii libpango-1.0-0 1.46.2-3
ii librda0 0.0.5-1.1
ii libsystemd0 247.3-7
ii libx11-6 2:1.7.2-1
ii libxext6 2:1.3.3-1.1
ii libxklavier16 5.4-4
ii libxss1 1:1.2.3-1
ii libxxf86vm1 1:1.1.4-1+b2
ii mate-desktop-common 1.24.1-2
ii mate-screensaver-common 1.24.1-1
ii mate-session-manager 1.24.1-2

Versions of packages mate-screensaver recommends:
ii mate-power-manager 1.24.2-1

Versions of packages mate-screensaver suggests:
pn rss-glx <none>
ii xscreensaver-data 5.45+dfsg1-2

-- no debconf information