Re: Enormous utmp since mpsafetty

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:12:55 +0200
Philip Paeps <philip_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 2008-08-26 22:44:55 (+0800), kevin <kevinxlinuz_at_163.com> wrote:
> > Philip Paeps wrote:
> > > Has anyone else noticed that /var/run/utmp sometimes grows to insane sizes
> > > (998M) since mpsafetty?  I've been trying to pinpoint the culprit but I
> > > haven't been successful so far.
> > > 
> > > I don't think mpsafetty itself is to blame.  Rather something which expects
> > > our old tty system.
> > > 
> > > My original reaction was to blame screen, but I can't immediately see where it
> > > might be going wrong.
> > > 
> > > Mysterious.  Anyone have any ideas?
> >
> > Could you check the output of `last`?
> 
> The output of last looks sane...  last checks wtmp though, not utmp, if I'm
> not mistaken?  Interestingly, strings on utmp only shows the records I expect
> to be there.  The rest of the file seems to be filled with zeros.
> 
> Very strange.
> 

There are many more pseudo-ttys in /etc/ttys now.  AFAIK utmp allocates
an entry for every one of them at startup.

---
Gary Jennejohn