Twice in the past 7 days, one of my RedHat 9 boxes has exhibited strange behavior in tracking login information. -w- and -who- are reporting no users although at both times, there were roughly 70 logins according to -top-. Even more bizarre is that for some users, -id- was returning different login credentials than the user that was currently logged in. For other users, the login information was correct; but for some, _no_ respsonse was returned from -id-, nor -whoami-.
A quick search showed /var/log/wtmp and /var/run/utmp being severely out of sync. Timestamps on the files differed by several hours and /var/run/utmp was no longer being updated. New logins were not being logged, but shell access was still available. Performance wise, the machine was still usable, although new logins took more time than normal. There does not appear to be any coincidence in the time of the event, other than the fact both instances occurred in the early afternoon when users were logged in multiple times (3-4 on average).
I tried resyncing the files by catting a /dev/null to /var/run/utmp and logrotating /var/log/wtmp to no avail. Logins were not still showing up and obviously, none of the currently logged in users were listed either. This has now happened under both 2.4.20-19.9smp and 2.4.20-20.9smp kernels. The only _quick_ solution was to reboot the machine since internal records were being corrupted by the misidentified user ids.
Has anyone else experienced such a thing? Any ways of resyncing those files? Any idea on where to look for any hints? As it currently stands, nothing in /var/log shows any information of what could be causing the files to fall out of sync and the only solution has been to reboot. The machine is fully up2date not doing much other than running NFS, Apache for our intranet and multiple compiled (gcc 3.2) programs running as SGID to query/write to an internal database. Under my signature I have included an overview of the machine, any help is greatly appreciated.
-Pete
-------------------------- Pete Huckelba redhat@xxxxxxxxx
Linux version 2.4.20-20.9smp (bhcompile@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) (gcc version 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)) #1 SMP Mon Aug 18 11:32:15 EDT 2003
NOTE- this is a hyperthreaded machine and only has 2 physical CPUs.
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.66GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 2658.176
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 5308.41
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.66GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 2658.176
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 5308.41
processor : 2
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.66GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 2658.176
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 3
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 5308.41
processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.66GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 2658.176
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 3
siblings : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 5308.41
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 2113925120 1981554688 132370432 0 235589632 1483210752 Swap: 542629888 32313344 510316544 MemTotal: 2064380 kB MemFree: 129268 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 230068 kB Cached: 1435008 kB SwapCached: 13440 kB Active: 1291088 kB ActiveAnon: 104472 kB ActiveCache: 1186616 kB Inact_dirty: 151448 kB Inact_laundry: 282952 kB Inact_clean: 54228 kB Inact_target: 355940 kB HighTotal: 1179584 kB HighFree: 36632 kB LowTotal: 884796 kB LowFree: 92636 kB SwapTotal: 529912 kB SwapFree: 498356 kB
Personalities : [raid0] [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
1052160 blocks [2/2] [UU]md1 : active raid0 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
529920 blocks 64k chunksmd2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0]
81923392 blocks [2/2] [UU]md3 : active raid1 sdb5[1] sda5[0]
51199040 blocks [2/2] [UU]md4 : active raid1 sdb6[1] sda6[0]
35840896 blocks [2/2] [UU]md5 : active raid1 sdb7[1] sda7[0]
25077312 blocks [2/2] [UU]unused devices: <none> nfs 84600 29 (autoclean) lp 9188 0 (autoclean) parport 39072 0 (autoclean) [lp] nfsd 81104 20 (autoclean) lockd 59536 1 (autoclean) [nfs nfsd] sunrpc 87516 1 (autoclean) [nfs nfsd lockd] e1000 60704 1 microcode 5184 0 (autoclean) keybdev 2976 0 (unused) mousedev 5688 1 hid 22404 0 (unused) input 6208 0 [keybdev mousedev hid] usb-uhci 27468 0 (unused) usbcore 82816 1 [hid usb-uhci] ext3 73376 5 jbd 56368 5 [ext3] raid1 16076 5 raid0 3848 1 3w-xxxx 40128 12 sd_mod 13452 24 scsi_mod 110872 2 [3w-xxxx sd_mod]
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