Hi,
It took me a while to figure out what was wrong.
Problem was "w" was reporting that users are idle for
a longer period that even the system had been up for.
Cleaning of wtmp on a nightly basis thru cron did not
solve this problem either.
Found out that a program, "idled" which I installed
then disabled sometime ago, had created files in /dev
in the form of sky:0, oraac:0...., where these are
Xterm names. These files had messages from idled:
xxx_at_/dev$ cat sky:0
Tue Nov 21 13:25:55
This terminal has been idle 60 minutes. If it remains
idle
for 30 more minutes it will be logged out by the
system.
xxx_at_/dev$
So the number of days reported with "w" command was
based on date of this file, hence today it was showing
idle time of 50days, while the system had been up for
only 25 days. I removed these text files from /dev,
and immediately the output from "w" is correct. This
leaves me wandering for the relation between "w" and
the /dev, for I thought it depends solely on
wtmp/utmp. I checked "idled" configuration file
(idled.cf), and it does not indicate that it was
supposed to write anything to /dev!!
Unique situation, nowonder no further suggestions
came up when I posted it the second time.
Any educative explanations are warmly welcomed.
_Gracias
=====
Richard F. Mollel
Systems Administrator
SAIC
Greenbelt, MD
Experience is what allows you to recognize
a mistake the second time you make it.
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Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 17:00:12 NZDT