The who command

[Rick Stevens]

On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 13:55 -0400, Mark McCulligh wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 11:55 -0400, Mark McCulligh wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>Hi Group,
> >>
> >>When I log into my system and run the who command I get no users. If I 
> >>look at my uptime is says 0 users. Plus if I view the lastlog file it 
> >>looks like it is corrupt.  How I am fix this?
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >"who" is based on what's in /var/log/utmp or /var/log/wtmp.  If one of
> >those files is not present, who can't report on users.  However,
> >/var/log/wtmp is MANDATORY on Linux and is created by init if it does
> >not exist.
> >  
> >
> I have tried using the root user. The wtmp file does exist but is 
> blank.  Any ideas?

When you say "blank", what do you mean?  Remember that it's a binary
file, so "cat" or "vi" are liable to spit out garbage or nothing.

Can you post an "ls -l" of it?  It should look something like this:

[root at prophead ~]# ls -l /var/log/wtmp
-rw-rw-r--  1 root utmp 364416 Jun 27 15:42 /var/log/wtmp

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
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