Original Problem:
"last" shows users as "still logged in" long after they have logged off.
Respondants:
John McAvoy <mcavoy_john@isus.emc.com>
Bob Woodward <bobw@kramer.filmworks.com>
Karl E. Vogel <vogelke@c17.wpafb.af.mil>
Explanation & Solution:
Some Suns don't clear logins until the next time someone logs
in at that terminal. It occurs when people don't log out before they
disconnect. Sun introduced the "utmpd" daemon on Solaris to correct the
problem, but their original version had bugs and sometimes made things
worse. The current version seems to work quite well as long as the defaults
are set properly in /etc/default/utmpd:
SCAN_PERIOD=300
MAX_FDS = 0
These values come from
http://remus.rutgers.edu/~adrian/solaris/problems.html
and they worked for my machine, a Solaris 2.4 Sun Sparc Classic,
but another suggested set of values was SCAN_PERIOD=30 and MAX_FDS=3 .
These values didn't work for my machine. There's also a public version
of utmpd that's quite stable. I haven't been able to find this for
Solaris 2.4 yet, though I found one for Solaris x86 at iguana.hut.fi .
The web page at
http://www2.gu.kiev.ua:8080/text/gopher-data/library/SUN/utmp.problems.fixx
suggests the patch "102286-01 SunOS 5.4: /usr/lib/utmpd fix"
however this patch is no longer publically available at sunsite.unc.edu
where I shop. I tried to find what patch had replaced it by doing "grep
102286 *" in a directory containing the .readme files for all Solaris
2.4 recommended and security patches but it wasn't mentioned in any of them.
I'm very grateful to Sun Managers for getting my "last" command working
again. It would have taken me weeks without your advice.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:18 CDT