[breezy] : Intermittent utmp breakage ?

Peter Garrett peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au
Wed Feb 22 02:27:25 UTC 2006


I'm running 5.10 (breezy) .

Every few days, the "who" and "w" commands fail, giving for example with
"w", only the top lines without any lines showing users logged in .
Something like:

$ w
 13:21:39 up 1 day, 22:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.39, 0.39, 0.25
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

instead of the expected

 13:21:39 up 1 day, 22:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.39, 0.39, 0.25
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
peter    pts/0    :0.0             Tue15   13:25m  1.31s 11.55s

<snipped output>

The only way I've found to fix this is to delete /var/run/utmp and
re-create it with the correct permissions, which appear to be like this:

$ ls -l /var/run/utmp
-rw-rw-r--  1 root utmp 768 2006-02-22 01:06 /var/run/utmp

It then returns to normal for a few days before misbehaving again. I'm
guessing something in cron or anacron is making a meal of it, but I don't
know .

Does anyone know what might be causing this strange behaviour? Has anyone
else noticed the same thing ?

Peter






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