Login Strangeness

[Paul Frederiksen]

Fellow Admins-

I found this to be quite bizzare! I have a user that is logged in, but a w/who/users/etc does not show her as being logged in....What causes this?

zuul: /var ### pfrederi $ ps -ef | grep asanchez
asanchez 14836 14831 0 Jan 10 ttys6 0:00 -ksh
asanchez 14831 14830 0 Jan 10 pts/t7 0:08 -pksh-ksh
pfrederi 13479 11218 1 09:54:16 ttyu2 0:00 grep asanchez
asanchez 16328 14836 0 Jan 10 ttys6 178:10 udt


zuul: /var ### pfrederi $ w | grep asanchez
pfrederi pty/ttyu2 2:26pm 1 1 grep asanchez

Anyone else find this odd? Or is it just me?

TIA, will summarize,

Paul

[Patrick Wallek]

I see from your output that you are running Unidata (the udt process). Does this user show up if you do a /usr/ud/bin/listuser?

Perhaps the user incorrectly closed the telnet session. If they were logging in from a PC and just closed the terminal emulator without logging off first? It is still strange that it is not showing up with who though.

[Paul Frederiksen]

They do show up in unidata as being logged in, they are also still logged in therefor it can't be an incorrectly shut down terminal program. That was my first thought though ;)

[Patrick Wallek]

You may have a problem with your /etc/utmp file.

1) Make sure it exists
2) Check permissions - Mine is at
-rw-r--r-- 1 root bin 2700 Jan 11 10:57 /etc/utmp
3) If all else fails you may try reinitialising it by doing a 'cat /dev/null > /etc/utmp' and then see if all subsequent login show up.