lastlog devours universe

[Andy Ross]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> Most backup software I've looked at mentions sparse files and how to
> handle them.

The question wasn't whether or not software can handle the sparse
file, but whether human sysadmins will know this.  Seriously: tell me
you weren't surprised to find a 1,254,130,450,140 byte file sitting in
the same directory as benign stuff like "messages" and "maillog".  I
was surprised.  Other posters to this thread were surprised.

Surprise is bad, and you can't document your way out of the problem by
adding flags to tar and rsync (which I'll come right out and admit
that I've never used nor heard of).

Maybe shadow-utils is too far upstream, too old, or too arcane for you
guys to fix.  But I can't see this as anything but a bug.  If you're
going to "not a bug" this, then you should probably consider why the
-S/--sparse flags to your backup tools are not on by default.

As it stands, very few users have hardware capable of making a backup
of the standard FC4/x86_64 log directory using standard arguments to
standard tools.

Andy