[ale] lastlog

[Jerry Yu]

I simply removed nfs-utils  on x86_64 servers since I have no use for NFS.
zero out /var/log/lastlog and it won't come back again. it came to my
attention when a tar/untar efforts failed saying I ran out of disk space.

On 12/20/05, James P. Kinney III <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 23:20 -0500, Chris Ricker wrote:
> > On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> >
> > > My /var/log/lastlog shows a file size of 1.2T.
> > >
> > > It would be kind of cool if that were possible. But I don't _have_
> even
> > > 1T of drive space on the machine.
> > >
> > > So a digging around of man pages shows lastlog as _always_ having a
> > > bogus large file size. ls -s shows it as 60(B) while ls -h shows 1.2T
> > >
> > > Does ext(3) have issues with sparse files (which is what lastlog is)?
> >
> > That's more-or-less normal. The apparent size (ls -h) of lastlog will
> vary
> > with architecture, vendor, Unix flavor, UIDs on the system, etc., but it
> > should be sparse and will likely appear huge (for some value of huge ;-)
> >
> > The idea is that lastlog is indexed by uid but is sparse so you don't
> > waste disk space. The huge sparseness you're seeing is because nfsnobody
> > on your OS is uid -1. nfsnobody uid of -1 on x86_64 is 4294967294, and
> > indexing to 4294967294 reserves 1.2 terabytes
>
> Ah HA!! You hit it dead on. Many thanks for the tutoring lesson on
> indexing a filesystem.
>
> >
> > ext3 is fine with it, but your utils (tar, cpio, etc) may or may not do
> > what you want -- treat it as a sparse file, rather than as a really long
> > really compressible string -- depending on rev, vendor, options used,
> etc.
> >
> > later,
> > chris
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> --
> James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
> CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
> Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
> 770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
> http://www.localnetsolutions.com
>
> GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
> <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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>
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