[breezy] : Intermittent utmp breakage ?

[Phillip Susi]

Hrm... strange.  Today I noticed that while w did not work, both who and 
finger did.


Phillip Susi wrote:
> I noticed the same thing on a server at work, but since I don't actually 
> log into it very often and I'm the only one who does, I didn't think 
> much of it.
> 
> Peter Garrett wrote:
>> I'm running 5.10 (breezy) .
>>
>> Every few days, the "who" and "w" commands fail, giving for example with
>> "w", only the top lines without any lines showing users logged in .
>> Something like:
>>
>> $ w
>>  13:21:39 up 1 day, 22:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.39, 0.39, 0.25
>> USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
>>
>> instead of the expected
>>
>>  13:21:39 up 1 day, 22:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.39, 0.39, 0.25
>> USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
>> peter    pts/0    :0.0             Tue15   13:25m  1.31s 11.55s
>>
>> <snipped output>
>>
>> The only way I've found to fix this is to delete /var/run/utmp and
>> re-create it with the correct permissions, which appear to be like this:
>>
>> $ ls -l /var/run/utmp
>> -rw-rw-r--  1 root utmp 768 2006-02-22 01:06 /var/run/utmp
>>
>> It then returns to normal for a few days before misbehaving again. I'm
>> guessing something in cron or anacron is making a meal of it, but I don't
>> know .
>>
>> Does anyone know what might be causing this strange behaviour? Has anyone
>> else noticed the same thing ?
>>
>> Peter
>>
>>
>>
> 
>