Ubuntu – the ‘whoopsie’ process and how can I remove it

apporterror handlingwhoopsie

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

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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