SUMMARY: Failed to write utmpx entry

From: Richard Hinton (richard_hinton@INS.COM)
Date: Thu Aug 07 1997 - 14:02:29 CDT


Thanks for all responses.

The general consensus is to ignore these messages. Since /var is under a different filesystem, when the system is rebooted by a shutdown or init command, the /etc/shudown script unmounts the /var partition before the command to write these entries is executed. This does not hurt anything since these entries never get entered into the /var/adm/utmpx file.

Ways to "fix" the "problem"

1. Comment out the third-from-the-last line in the /etc/rc0 shutdown script. The line is:

#/sbin/umount /var >/dev/null 2>&1

This will write the entries to the utmpx file, but will leave the /var partition mounted when the system goes down (could cause fs errors, possibly).

2. Create files utmp and utmpx in / so that the init write will succeed (in single-user, umount /var, create /var/adm under /, then create these two files). When /var is unmounted, the /var/adm/ directory is present under the root partition, and it will successfully write the entries into the utmpx file (this will get rid of the messages, however, the entries will not be written to the *real* utmpx file, so they will never be seen.)

3. If you wanted to log the exact time of shutdown, you can change one of the scripts in /etc/rc0.d so
that the time is written to a file in the root filesystem.

Thanks again for all the responses.

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Richard Hinton INTERNATIONAL NETWORK SERVICES
Network Systems Engineer 14160 Dallas Pkwy.
Page (800)INS-1-INS Suite 200, Dallas, TX 75240
<www.ins.com> Phone (972)392-3545 Ext. 225
EmailPage:<0879115@pagenet.net> Fax (972)392 2381
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