[breezy] : Intermittent utmp breakage ?

[Phillip Susi]

I noticed the same thing on a server at work, but since I don't actually 
log into it very often and I'm the only one who does, I didn't think 
much of it.

Peter Garrett wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
>