Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 109243
utmp file grows
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:59:11 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: Entries in the /var/run/utmp file are never removed when a user logs out and the file continues to grow. When a user logs out, ut_type is set to DEAD_PROCESS and several of the other fields are set to NULL but the entry itself remains. This can be verified by running utmpdump... For systems that are not rebooted for a long time (6-12 months) this file grows very large. Is this expected behavior? If so why? I expect a user's entry to be removed when they logout. I have confirmed this behavior for both telnet and rlogin. Thanks, /Pete Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): util-linux-2.11y-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.login with either telnet or rlogin 2.utmpdump 3.logout 4.utmpdump Actual Results: My entry in utmp remained but the value of certain fields was changed as described above. Expected Results: My expectation is that the entry would be removed when I logout. Additional info:
After looking into this problem more, I have found that /bin/login is not re using previous entries in the utmp file for the same tty. For example, if I login and logout on tty /dev/pts/0 multiple times in a row a new entry is added to the end of the utmp file each time. Looking at login.c this should not happen. login.c looks for a matching pid or tty and uses that entry. What is really strange is I downloaded the sourse (util-linux-2.11y-9.src.rpm), compiled a new login and replaced /bin/login with it and the problem goes away. With the new login, entries are reused if the tty is the same. Please advise...and thanks for any help ..... Pete
Any x86_64 stuff involved here? That's the only explanation I know of.
No this is a 32 bit P4.