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Date:      Sun, 11 Feb 2001 02:20:00 -0500 (EST)
From:      project10 <project10@siber.sparkhost.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   w/who/uptime not showing anyone logged in
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0102110205370.99428-100000@siber.sparkhost.com>

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Hello,
I've had a persistent problem with my FreeBSD system, specifically that
the w/who and uptime utilities don't show any users logged in. Example:
# uptime
 2:07AM  up  7:40, 0 users, load averages: 4.10, 3.16, 2.77     
# who
# w
2:07AM  up  7:40, 0 users, load averages: 3.77, 3.10, 2.75
USER             TTY      FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT    

Here's what I've already tried to fix the situation (I'm out of ideas, by
this point):
1) Rebuilds of all binaries involved (telnetd, login, w, who, uptime,
sshd)
2) Cvsup to latest version,with a buildworld (I've done this 5 or so
times, starting from 4.0-S up to 4.2-S now, the system is currently at
4.2-S)
3) Re-creating the utmp, lastlog, and wtmp files (rm file;touch file)
4) Hypothesizing that perhaps the files weren't being written to due to
lack to space, I symlinked the /var directory into a partition with much
more space. It had no effect.
5) Recompiling the kernel (I did this with every cvsup of the source tree)

I've noticed the following, which will probably help in diagnosing the
problem:
1) The "screen" utility adds a proper entry to the wtmp/utmp files, and
you can see users using "screen tcsh" as logged in through "who" or "w"
2) "last" shows users still logged in (wtmp entry not terminated
correctly?)
project10        ttyp5    abyss            Sun Feb 11 02:15   still logged in 
3) The utmp file is 0 bytes, when many users are logged in. utmp isn't
being written to correctly?
4) Grabbing a utmp file from a 'good' machine and placing it in
/var/run/utmp leads to w/who/uptime working again, as they should be. Of
course, it isn't a solution at all.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the utmp file isn't being
written to properly -- but the reason behind this, I cannot figure
out. Does anyone in the FreeBSD community have any suggestions as to what
I can try to remedy this situation?





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