lastlog devours universe
Neal Becker
ndbecker2 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 11:09:53 UTC 2005
Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 16:35 -0700, Andy Ross wrote:
>> Indeed:
>>
>> tar cf /tmp/unbelievably-huge-file /var/log/lastlog
>>
>> I killed it after 10 seconds and a few hundred MB. What if someone
>> tries to backup their logs? Surely there must be a saner way to store
>> this data than a 1.2TB sparse file... This is a sysadmin disaster
>> waiting to happen.
>
> From 'man tar'
>
> -S, --sparse
> handle sparse files efficiently
>
>
> From 'man rsync'
>
> -S, --sparse handle sparse files efficiently
>
> Most backup software I've looked at mentions sparse files and how to
> handle them. Perhaps what is prudent is a mention in the release notes
> and FAQs that /var/log/lastlog is a sparse file and should be treated
> accordingly.
>
If the change that causes /var/log/lastlog to be a huge sparse file is
accepted, it is _imperative_ that all common backup tools be updated to
support sparse by default. Actually, I don't understand why this isn't the
default anyway, except that it is a tiny bit slower (on Linux systems it
shouldn't be significantly slower).
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