In glibc 2.1 it appears that a daemon, utmpd, is required to
do utmp logging.  In Rawhide 1.2.7-1.2.9 at least, it does
not appear to run by default, so it must be manually started
for any user logging to occur.  Perhaps it should even
appear in /etc/inittab w/ respawn to prevent it from being
killed, rather than the initscripts?  The approach of
logging who is on the system by a daemon seems to be rather
suspect to begin with....