[Freeipa-users] Large lastlog from large UIDs

[Erinn Looney-Triggs]

While digging through and trying to investigate a file system slowdown
that may or may not be IPA related, I noticed an odd thing on my RHEL 5
and 6 based systems, the lastlog file was bloody huge:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 469419202628 Jan  3 00:20 /var/log/lastlog

Or for those of us who don't count that high .

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 438G Jan  3 00:20 /var/log/lastlog

Now really it isn't that big:

erinn at uat ~ $ du -sh /var/log/lastlog
64K     /var/log/lastlog

However, and I am no expert here, some backup programs will choke hard
on this file, because it appears all that empty space will actually get
nulled out, or at least this is happening to me with Bacula 5.0.2 on
RHEL 5. More investigation into this part is necessary though...

Now at a guess, this is probably related to this blog post:
http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com/2007/11/trimming-space-in-var-problem-with.html

That article was written for Solaris but it sure seems to be applicable
to Linux as well. Though the multiples aren't the same.

Frustratingly, this does not seem to be the case with all of my systems,
only some of them. I have multiple RHEL 5 and 6 instances exhibiting
this issue, and one RHEL 5 system that is not.

This is probably a result of IPA choosing ludicrously high UIDs to avoid
collisions (which is fine, no bashing here).

Can anyone else confirm? Lend more insight?

-Erinn


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