[10654] in Athena Bugs
finger - may be missing last login from /usr/adm/lastlog
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Wed Jul 7 20:02:22 1993
From: haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 17:02:16 -0700
To: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
This showed up at UCSC on the equivalent of a private workstation.
(Sun 4c, SunOS 4.1.1 and SunOS 4.1.3) I don't know if it happens at MIT
since I don't log in on a private machine there. I guess it might
show up on a public machine also; but a private machine is special in
that persons not currently logged in are still in the passwd file.
A user here complained that finger does not show the time of last login.
Sure enough, the /usr/athena/bin/finger in the local section reports
"Never logged in." while /usr/ucb/finger shows the last login time,
learned from either /usr/adm/lastlog or /usr/adm/wtmp or both. (It has
to be a user not currently logged in that you try this with.)
All I've learned so far from debugging efforts is that it appears the
lastlog and maybe wtmp files are being prematurely closed, so that the
test for non-negative file descriptor is causing the search of lastlog
to be skipped.
