'last' command produces way too much whitespace on output

[David Corlette]

I have a customer using HP-UX v1, v2, v3 (several versions) and they are attempting to use the 'last' command to examine the login activity.
On some systems, they see normal 'last' output like this:
root console Mon Feb 18 17:52 - 12:20 (37+18:28)

On other systems, their 'last' output has a huge amount of whitespace, like this:
root console Wed Oct 20 20:42 - 20:53 (00:10)


What the heck is going on? How do we fix 'last' to not do this?

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Would the system showing this be HPUX 11-V3?
Is it only 'last' showing issues, or other tools as well?

This is a WAG (Wild A$$ Guess):
Maybe Long Usernames are enabled?
Check: man lugadmin

Or the whitepaper:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01925719/c01925719.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

( used to be http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-4118/longusername_white_paper_updated.pdf )

hth,
Hein

[Ismail Azad]

Hi david,

I did a little "looking into" your problem and with the hint of the olmpians WAG {which was a spot on}, came with this finding....

I assume the command lugadmin -l shows 256 which means long usernames are enabled. Now, when this command - #lugadmin -e is executed the "user display width" is configured in a file called as /etc/default/lugname which takes the default "user display width".

On execution of lugadmin -e alone this excessive white space problem does not happen as the attribute UG_DISPLAY_WIDTH defaults to 0 in /etc/default/lugname. However, let's say you execute lugadmin -e -d 30. You will see a huge distance between spaces for fields in the "last" command as UG_DISPLAY_WIDTH is now 30 {the user display width}. Hence, if you don't want to see this huge whitespace or if you don't want to see {remember i said 'see' not disable as this is not possible!} the complete "long" usernames you could execute lugadmin -d 0 which will give you the normal "white space disance" seen on the other servers and following any username having 8 characters or more should be succeeded by a + sign.

The answer in a nutshell would be "the user DISPLAY width" that has been configured with your long usernames.

Welcome to ITRC! Don't forget to assign points!!!.

Regards
Ismail Azad

[Dennis Handly]

>How do we fix 'last' to not do this?

I assume you aren't using -x for long names?
Otherwise Hein is correct about lugadmin(1M).

[nijokj]

To enable long user and group names,

1. Stop the pwgrd daemon.

# /sbin/init.d/pwgr stop

2. Run the lugadmin command with the -e option.


# lugadmin -e [-d num]

3. The command requests confirmation before enabling the
system.

Long user/group name once enabled cannot be disabled in future.
Do you want to continue [yY]:

If you respond with y or Y, the command proceeds; otherwise,
it aborts.

4. The command creates the /etc/default/lugname file.

5. If the -d option is not specified, num defaults to 0. The
specified or default value of num is written in lugname.



eg: lugadmin -e -d 255

try -x flag with your lastb command.

[David Corlette]

Thanks to all who commented - I will pass this along to the customer and see if they can resolve the problem.

Hopefully they will get back to us so we can credit the right response.