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Accepted
Nanne
Asked: 2012-05-12 07:20:28 +0800 CST

What is the 'whoopsie' process and how can I remove it?

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On one of my machines I have a process running called "whoopsie". I'm running 12.04 server and never specifically installed anything with this name.

Google seems to imply that it has something to with error logs but I'm not finding too much information. The fact that I didn't manually install it and the 3 other servers I checked did in fact have no such running process OR executable made me a bit confused.

Does anyone know what the "whoopsie" process is?

Does anyone know what packages might have installed it? The server is quite plain, it has a LAMP stack, Samba and print servers and the Nagios NRPE plugin, nothing more installed, just standing there being a nice backup-server.

Some more info:

$ whoopsie -h
Usage:
  whoopsie [OPTION...]

Help Options:
  -h, --help           Show help options

Application Options:
  -f, --foreground     Run in the foreground

and

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND  
whoopsie   913  0.0  0.4  24448  2092 ?        Ssl  May07   0:00 whoopsie

and

$ sudo cat /etc/passwd | grep whoop
whoopsie:x:107:118::/nonexistent:/bin/false
error-handling apport whoopsie

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What's whoopsie ?

    • It's the "Ubuntu Error Reporting" daemon, and is installed by default in both desktop/server installations.
    • When something crashes, whoopsie does two things:
      1. Collects the crash report generated by Apport and
      2. Can send them to Ubuntu/Canonical (specifically to https://daisy.ubuntu.com in BSON)

    Whoopsie won't send your crash reports without your permission!

    • As Evan explains in his answer below, the actual transmission of crash data occurs only if you permit it via the graphical dialog (see below), or for a CLI server, explicitly run apport-cli.

      screenshot

    How do I disable it on my desktop?

    GNOME Shell (Ubuntu 17.10+)

    screenshot

    Unity (Ubuntu before 17.04)

    • Go to Settings...Privacy...

      screenshot

    • And in the Diagnostics Tab, uncheck the Send Error Reports to Canonical option:

      screenshot

    How do I disable it on a server or via the command-line?

    • Just change the report_crashes parameter to false in the /etc/default/whoopsie file.
    • Then bid farewell to whoopsie with sudo service whoopsie stop.
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  2. Whoopsie is part of the Ubuntu error tracker. It takes the crash reports that apport creates and presents whenever an application fails and sends them to a Canonical server for further processing. The data collected from these reports help us prioritize and track the most pressing issues:

    https://errors.ubuntu.com

    The small (in disk space, not necessarily CPU/RAM usage) whoopsie daemon process is run by default on both Ubuntu desktop and server installations. It will only send reports out if you explicitly approve this in the dialog that appears on desktop installs, or in the case of the server, manually run apport-cli.

    You can disable it by going into System Settings -> Privacy -> Diagnostics and unchecking the box labelled "Send error reports to Canonical."

    To disable it on Ubuntu Server, edit the /etc/default/whoopsie file and change report_crashes= to false, then run sudo stop whoopsie.

    Note that if you do this, we will not be made aware of the problems affecting your computer and may be unable to fix them. I talk about how we use your data to make Ubuntu better in this video:

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  3. $ apt --simulate purge whoopsie

The following packages will be REMOVED

whoopsie*

$ apt purge whoopsie

    I've had no problems as I am in the process of building my own Ubuntu Desktop but so far that thing keeps crashing my system, but now I have got rid of it :)

    • 20

  4. It's Canonical's error reporting daemon.

    The off-putting thing about is that you are not even asked if you want it installed, which isn't so nice if your on a budget server hardware wise

    @Glynn BLower

    apt-get -s purge

    doesn't seem to actually deinstall the daemon, just shows you that it is there if you want to purge it

    apt-get purge

    did the trick on my 13.04 server install

    • 3

  5. It is the "Ubuntu crash database submission daemon": http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/whoopsie

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  6. Whoopsie has a list of dependencies, and they are redundant without Whoopsie Synaptic Package Manager does the trick

    Search > Whoopsie

    Mark for Complete Removal all the lib_* whoopsie related packages.

    Apply

    If you went the sudo apt-get -s purge whoopsie route, don't forget to sudo apt autoremove after that to get all the packages flushed.

    Suggest a sudo apt-get update after everything and then service --status-all to verify that 'whoopsie' isn't on your system.

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  7. Today I saw the process "whoopsie" in the connections running (lsof -i -n). I couldn't stop the process, I tried "kill PID", negative. Then I logged out of the "root account" and logged in again. The process continued with the same PID, which means that the process was not ended. Then I restarted the computer and the computer could not shut down because "whoopsie" was still running and could not be ended. So I had to press and hold the power button until the computer went out. The worst thing is that "whoopsie" uploaded a large amount of data to the internet at the time and I have no idea what. After that I deleted "whoopsie" from my PC with:

    apt remove --purge whoopsie && apt autoremove && apt autoclean && restart

    whoopsie screenshot

    ---EDIT--

    I forgot to say, whoopsie connected through the closed firewall. That is actually not possible.

    All ports are closed, except ports 443 and 9001 are open.

    Firewall screenshot

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