At 10:09 AM 12/3/01 -0800, Kevin Kropf wrote: >I have a full ram disk after 3 days, and I think it may be from the file >below? >What is it and why is it so large? I seams to contain a bunch of control >characters. > # dir -l w* >-rw-r----- 1 root root 2764800 Dec 3 10:10 wtmp [html duplicate deleted]
wtmp (more exactly, /var/log/wtmp) is a file that contains cumulative records of logins and logouts. On a full-size Linux system, you use a specialized program like "last" to read out its contents, which are kept in a file-specific data structure (for an example of it, look at the man page for wtmp or utmp). A log file that grows to 2.7 MB in 3 days will certainly cause a "full ram disk" on many LEAF-scale hosts (ones with 12 MB or so of RAM in total). Why it is so large depends on what your system is doing. I just checked my (non-LEAF) everyday development system, and it has a wtmp that is only about 25 KB for a month of logins (on full-size systems, this is one of the files that gets trimmed by the "logrotate" app), so certainly something is odd in your case. But with no information about your setup, I cannot suggest anything specific about *why* the file might be getting so large. I don't recall any prior reports to the list of EigerSteinBETA doing this (anyone else?). To get a scale of the problem, figure about 800 bytes per login/logout. That means your file size translates to about 34,000 logins over 3 days, or about one every 8 seconds. Something that happens this often should be leaving other indications of its presence. -- ------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Leaf-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user
