[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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