ORIGINAL POST:
> Though my problems may be systemic, I need a short term solution
> to the following problem. Our systems have a lot of users, on the order
> of 12000 total, with anywhere from 150-250 active at one time. My problem
> is that utmp(x) and wtmp(x) are growing and growing. Currently my wtmpx
> file is 198 MB. What happens if I delete these files? Can I delete one,
> say wtmp, if I don't delete the other, wtmpx? Can I delete wtmp(x) if I
> leave utmp(x). Any help would be appreciated. My partition is nearly
> full and I *have* to clear up the space.
SUMMARY:
The general consensus was that you can truncate them with impunity
accepting that your who, finger, lastlogin, etc commands may produce
incorrect data.
Most responders reduce these files by "cat /dev/null > utmp" after
backing them up or rotating them out.
Some others used PD packages or the Solaris command fwtmp
to truncate all entries in the files prior to a specified date. I did not
have time to look into these, but will before this problem arises again.
Personally while I waited for a quiet weekend time to truncate the
files, I had a real need for diskspace and just cat'ed /dev/null to
them while users were logged on, with no ill-effects.
thanks to the following for responding:
Ken Teh
Rahul Roy
Peter Tashkoff
Gary Smith
Dave Haut
Shaun McGee
Matthew.Stier
Bob Fulwiler
Wen Fung
Michael Price
Rachel Polanskis
Dirk Boenning
r02si
Richard Butler
Christophe DIARRA
Roderick (Rod) W. Failing III
Ira Childress
Richard Pieri
Bill Armand
Casper Dik
Simon-Bernard Drolet
Fedor Gnuchev
Brion Leary
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:05 CDT