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

Package:
mate-screensaver
Source:
mate-screensaver
Description:
MATE screen saver and locker
Submitter:
Derek Roberts
Date:
2026-07-28 14:51:07 UTC
Severity:
important
#1014298#5
Date:
2022-07-03 15:01:34 UTC
From:
To:
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.
#1014298#10
Date:
2026-07-27 12:36:18 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,
Have you experienced similar issue after reporting this issue? Is there any way we can reproduce it. Were you logged in as 'root' for a desktop session?

I am on two Debian systems (stable and sid) and I do not have `/var/log/auth.log`. It seems the correct place to check is `journalctl` and I do not see any errors related to `mate-screensaver`. Certainly not flooding type.
#1014298#15
Date:
2026-07-28 14:42:02 UTC
From:
To:
That would have been a regular desktop session. I wouldn't have logged
in as root.

That said, this was over 4 years ago and while I had a few subsequent
repeats of the issue after filing, it hasn't surfaced in the last 3
years. It's probably been fixed or fixed by something else.

Please go ahead and close this out

Thanks

Derek Roberts