The best thing in that case would be to increase the logrotate interval
for wtmp from a monthly to yearly basis. Somewhere under /etc you should
have an /etc/logrotate.conf file. Normally, a default entry for wtmp
would be:
# no packages own wtmp -- we'll rotate them here
/var/log/wtmp {
monthly
minsize 1M
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}
In plain English, this means "rotate the file once per month with
priority the timestamp and not the minimum size at 1 Meg". If you
replace the line "monthly" bit with "yearly" and take the minsize
parameter out, it should do the job.
After that, do a: logrotate -dv /etc/logrotate.conf and verify what the
logrotate tool is planning to do with the new parameters. It should
verify the yearly rotation for wtmp.
Warning: Depending on how busy the system is not only wtmp/utmp log wise
but from other logs, I normally partition /var separarely to make sure I
have plenty of space. If you have /var under root, watch out for the
size of the log(s).
GM
--
--
George Magklaras
Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator
EMBnet Technical Management Board
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo,
University of Oslo
http://folk.uio.no/georgios
Paula J. Lindsay wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have a scientist that runs an instrument in her lab. She uses utmp
and logrotate to rotate the wtmp file and then
at the beginning of the month, she records everyone's logging in and out
usage on her RHE 5 machine so she
can charge them for the use of the instrument. Sometimes students and
other doctor's run experiments all night.
Well, I have her RHE 5 machine rotating every month at the beginning of
the month, it does this at midnight.
The problem is that whoever is logged in at that time is dropped and
the utmp doesn't continue to record his/her
time on the machine. They could be on there for another 5 hours, but it
doesn't pick up that user again. Is there
any way to make the utmp pick up that user or continue recording that
user when the logs are processing again?
I know this is somewhat of an irritating quirk, but it is important to
her to find out when the person logs back out
so she doesn't charge him too much or too little. Any
help/advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Many
thanks in advance.
Paula
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