Hi Folks,
It's spring-clean time again ... Been recovering disk space occupied by stuff I don't really want to know about.
In particular, /var/log/lastlog is 19MB in size, but the output of 'lastlog' is 2225 bytes on 35 lines, telling me *ALL About the Very Last Time Each User Logged In*.[1]
Most of these are, of course "pseudo" users like
bin daemon adm lp sync shutdown halt mail news uucp operator games gopher ftp rpm vcsa nscd sshd rpc rpcuser nfsnobody mailnull smmsp pcap apache xfs named ntp gdm
who never log in anyway!
So that's 19136220/35 = 546749 bytes or half a MB for each "user", and from inspection nearly all of that is bytes with value "00"! (Indeed it gzips down to 18668 bytes, i.e. 1/1000).
Now I can use an extra 19MB of space on that partition (whose free space varies from near-0 to about 400MB depending on what I'm up to), so I'm feeling mean about 19MB devoted to totally boring info.
Hence I'm wondering (a) what's the best way to suppress this lastlog stuff; (b) would it traumatise the system to suppress it?
Thanks for any comments! Best wishes to all, Ted.
[1]. E.g. ftp **Never logged in** ted pts/12 brandy Sun Oct 30 10:09:37 +0000 2005
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