Bug 23071

Summary: wtmp entry not rolled over after logrotate
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Yoda <gbj>
Component: logrotateAssignee: Erik Troan <ewt>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.0CC: abartlet
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Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2001-01-01 13:24:13 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Yoda 2001-01-01 13:24:11 UTC 
As an aside I removed the wtmp patch from pppd to enable utmp entries of ppp users.  Why is this disabled by default?

I would expect that when you rotate the wtmp file each month you would want the users who are "still logged in" to be transfered into the new wtmp file.

I would guess that the best way to do this is to effectively log them out of the old wtmp.1 and log them back into the new wtmp file.

This is very important for accounting purposes.

I would like to know your thoughts on this issue.

Thanks

Grahame Jordan
Comment 1 Preston Brown 2001-06-21 19:59:28 UTC 
Users know that the user login record (wtmp) gets rotated monthly.  the "last" 
command can take a file to examine on the command line, so running last -f 
/var/log/wtmp.1 is possible to get around the issue you have raised.