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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.sysadmin
- Path: sparky!uunet!darwin.sura.net!wupost!eclnews!jezebel!victor
- From: victor@jezebel.wustl.edu (Victor Wickerhauser)
- Subject: Diasappearing wtmp
- Message-ID: <1992Jul25.173911.29664@wuecl.wustl.edu>
- Sender: usenet@wuecl.wustl.edu (Usenet Administrator)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: jezebel
- Organization: Washington University, St. Louis Mo.
- Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 17:39:11 GMT
- Lines: 31
-
-
- We have approximately 5000 accounts in a 3-level NetInfo hierarchy. We have
- only a symbolic link .login file in each home directory, since the template
- files installed by nu contain 42kb even after Mr. Jobs' letter is deleted
- (=>210 MB for all our users). The linked .login file copies the relevant
- dotfiles upon the first login and then removes itself, exploiting the
- assumption that many of the users will never log in. Our system is new and
- currently used by only a few consultants; its 5000 users do not know about it
- yet.
-
- One afternoon at 17:19 when I was running a background script to install
- these links, remove the other dotfiles and recursively change ownership on
- home directories, the WindowServer died with a message to /tmp/console.log.
- At that point the chown script started complaining "user unknown" into its
- logfile. Also, mail to one of our 5000 users started bouncing, and another
- user was unable to log into his account . I noticed that /etc/wtmp did not
- exist, so I created an empty one with `touch', after which the mail stopped
- bouncing and the other user could log in. I then rebooted the mailhost, for
- the usual superstitious reasons.
-
- It is natural to test wtmp with `last' if something suspicious happens, so
- its disappearance becomes immediately obvious. Be warned that there are
- apparently some surprising side-effects.
-
- Regards,
- Victor
-
- ----
- Prof. M. Victor Wickerhauser (314)935-6771 <victor@jezebel.wustl.edu>
- Dept. of Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130 USA
-
-