Hello people,
We have a bit of problem with our AlphaStation 200 4/233, running
osf 3.2, wtmp seems to be getting locked and dissallowing connections.
People can login, but it stops after showing the last successful/unsuccessful
logins.
Considering:
yoyo ~ > wc /etc/passwd
5901 17296 452359 /etc/passwd
yoyo ~ > last | head -5000 | grep "Thu Jan 09" | wc
2756 27542 203956
^^^^ and this is holidays, just wait till semester starts again.
This is quite a problem, it can be fixed by doing:
kill -9 `lsof -t /var/adm/wtmp`
but it's only temporary, it happens again within a few hours/days. It seems to
be happening more frequently as time progresses.
One or two of the people who admin the machine (there are 50 or so, it's part
of a student group type thing, and all work is voluntry) suspect is can be
caused by doing a last of someone who hasn't been on for a while and
then ^C'ing it before it completes. If this is the case then I guess it must
be while another login tries to access the wtmp while the last is accessing it.
But I'm not so sure this is the case, I tried it a few times and it didn't seem
to have any effect, but then the machine wasn't all that busy at the time.
If anyone happens to have any bright ideas on a more permanent fix, or a patch
or something that will fix this it would be great.
--
Michael Biggs ObQuote: "Don't Panic" THHGTTG" ObJob: Unix Guff
Email: biggles_at_trench.eng.monash.edu.au Civil Engineering
WWW: http://www.cc.monash.edu.au/~biggles Monash University
Received on Thu Jan 09 1997 - 15:30:07 NZDT