Hi, Has anyone else encountered this situation?
I was looking at my /var/log directory and this popped out at me -rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 18692964 May 17 04:19 lastlog I'm still tweaking a recent upgrade from Slink to Potato, so I guess I do a lot of su - logins, but still isn't that an enormous file for its purpose? 'man lastlog' does have a cautionary statement about wide gaps in uid #'s slowing down the time it takes for lastlog to print to screen when a user logs in. And, as a consequence of having qmail installed I do have huge gaps in uid's because Debian requires the 7 qmail uid's to be 64010 to 64016. Could this have any bearing on the huge size of the log file? Also, I did an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' earlier in the day and got broken 'libpam0g-0.72-7', 'libpam-modules-0.72-7' and 'libpam-runtime-0.72-7' packages. Later I did a successful 'apt-get upgrade' on those 3 packages which were by then upgraded to version '0.72-8'. I do know the libpam upgrades affected files related to '/var/log/lastlog' such as 'login' and 'passwd'. Could that have any bearing on its huge size? Even so, is there some command I can issue to flush the log so I can keep it in proportion? Or will some regular process eventually reduce the size of /var/log/lastlog and free up that disk space? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, montefin
