utmp and wtmp
George Magklaras
georgios at biotek.uio.no
Fri Jul 4 11:11:43 UTC 2008
The best thing in that case would be to increase the logrotate interval
for wtmp from a monthly to yearly basis. Somewhere under /etc you should
have an /etc/logrotate.conf file. Normally, a default entry for wtmp
would be:
# no packages own wtmp -- we'll rotate them here
/var/log/wtmp {
monthly
minsize 1M
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}
In plain English, this means "rotate the file once per month with
priority the timestamp and not the minimum size at 1 Meg". If you
replace the line "monthly" bit with "yearly" and take the minsize
parameter out, it should do the job.
After that, do a: logrotate -dv /etc/logrotate.conf and verify what the
logrotate tool is planning to do with the new parameters. It should
verify the yearly rotation for wtmp.
Warning: Depending on how busy the system is not only wtmp/utmp log wise
but from other logs, I normally partition /var separarely to make sure I
have plenty of space. If you have /var under root, watch out for the
size of the log(s).
GM
--
--
George Magklaras
Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator
EMBnet Technical Management Board
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo,
University of Oslo
http://folk.uio.no/georgios
Paula J. Lindsay wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I have a scientist that runs an instrument in her lab. She uses utmp
> and logrotate to rotate the wtmp file and then
> at the beginning of the month, she records everyone's logging in and out
> usage on her RHE 5 machine so she
> can charge them for the use of the instrument. Sometimes students and
> other doctor's run experiments all night.
> Well, I have her RHE 5 machine rotating every month at the beginning of
> the month, it does this at midnight.
> The problem is that whoever is logged in at that time is dropped and
> the utmp doesn't continue to record his/her
> time on the machine. They could be on there for another 5 hours, but it
> doesn't pick up that user again. Is there
> any way to make the utmp pick up that user or continue recording that
> user when the logs are processing again?
> I know this is somewhat of an irritating quirk, but it is important to
> her to find out when the person logs back out
> so she doesn't charge him too much or too little. Any
> help/advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Many
> thanks in advance.
> Paula
>
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