On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Duncan Patton a Campbell <campb...@neotext.ca> wrote: > I've a question about last/utmp/wtmp that someone here should be able to > answer. > > At the shell I do > > # date > Sat Dec 19 16:29:07 MST 2015 > # last > > wtmp begins Sat Dec 19 16:29 2015 > > This appears to set the beginning time to "now" > every time I run the thing. WTF sets the > lower bound so as to see back from "now"? > > It is not exactly obvious from the man pages how this works. > I'm sure it's there, I just can't find it.
Well, you apparently know that the data comes from /var/log/wtmp, so what's the status of that file? It should be a normal file of non-zero length. If it's a symlink to /dev/null or something bogus then you need to figure out why and maybe reinstall from scratch. Also, you failed to include the dmesg or even mention what version you're running, so maybe we should just go with "you're clearly running an out of date version and probably screwed up an upgrade across the time_t size change"... Philip Guenther
