[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Zapped wtmp...

[From: Kimmo Hämäläinen]

Hi,

We have a 'temp reaper' daemon for deleting some temporary files that
have not been used for some time (e.g. temporary E-mail attachments):

https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/osso-af-utils/src/temp-reaper.c

It only seems to clear '/var/tmp' currently. I don't know why we have
missed the wtmp file...

A skilled do-it-yourself man could add '/var/log' there, recompile, and
replace the binary. It should work if wtmp is not touched too often and
it's not kept open by any program.

BR; Kimmo

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 17:34, ext Nils Faerber wrote:
> Hi!
> I thought I should let you know...
> 
> I am not sure if I really found any cure to anything but after the
> latest discussions about the size of wtmp I checked mine on the 770 and
> found a more than 200MB file!
> 
> After gzip'ping it it shrank to just 5MB because it contains almost only
> 0s. But there must be the information for 200MB stored somewhere in the
> JFFS2 so I guess that even if it only has 5MB as a comporessed file the
> impact on a JFFS2 can be much worse.
> 
> So I enabled the R&D mode, became root and linked /var/log/wtmp to
> /dev/null (who cares for this wtmp on the 770 anyway?).
> 
> Before I did this I saw more and more weird phenomena on the device,
> like crashing browser and spurious power-offs when case closed (almost
> 100% battery, closed device one night, next morning it was powered off
> and had to be rebooted!).
> 
> Now after I zapped wtmp I have the feeling (!) that it behaves much
> better again! I can browse pages that before did not work and I hope
> that the power-downs are history now too (for the last three days they
> are but you never know).
> 
> Maybe someone else likes to try to this too and report his/her
> experience here.
> 
> Probably wtmp should be linked to /dev/null in the next software release
> too.
> 
> BTW: With every closure of the case the wtmp grows by about 3kB. You can
> estimate with your usage how big it will get...
> 
> Cheers
>   nils faerber