lastb and last problems

Woland · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 7:20 am Post subject: lastb and last problems

O. K. , I know there is no such thing as a stupid question, but this might come close. It's just that it seems so damn tricky.

My gentoo install seems to be working fine, just one hitch: though the last command will display all the users that have logged in on the machene, the lastb command simply does not exist. Yes, I have touched /var/log/btmp so it does exist, but it stays empty. Last itself resides in
/bin/last
but lastb is nowhere to be found. I guess I don't need lastb as such, since I can run last -f /var/log/btmp but if btmp does not get written to, I am out of luck, eh?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

rac · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 7:46 am Post subject: Re: lastb and last problems

Woland · Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2002 8:04 am Post subject:

Well, in the slap on the forehrad and cry D'OH! department, I looked in /var/log and sure enough there is a whole pwdfail directory, which seems to do everything that btmp used to. Now it is back to the manual paged for me to figure out how to make logrotate keep the files in there a bit longer and not make three or four of these log files a day. If you might have the patience to suggest any network security monitoring tools, that work with all this new-fangled PAM stuff, I would be greatly obliged.

BTW, symlinking blast to last worked like a charm. I know that there are some clever programs which function differently when you run them through a symlink (bash, vim) but it always comes as a surpise. Not a soultion which would have come to me of its own, so I guess my n00b designation is still earned--in spite of the fact that my first distro was RedHat 2.1(ORA).

My hearfelt thanks for the speed of the reply, as well as for the reply itself.