Hi list, this problem is already known and I'm sorry to bother if an acceptable workaround was already debated on the list. I was getting trouble with a 'grep something /var/log*' which caused the "Memory exhausted" message. With some deeper search I found the lastlog file in /var/log/ to be 1.2T sized. This seems to come from the nfsnobody's uid to be 4294967294 on x86_64 system (and -1 on i386) and the pre-allocation space for every uid (so from 0 to ...4294967294...hum..) from lastlog. Since I do not use NFS at all, can I just erase the nfsnobody from /etc/passwd and start with a blank lastlog file (this looks like a great way to nuke my system)? Or do I need to explicitly exclude this file from all my search? How do you -x86_64 users- deal with this? It seems the mainstream people don't see this as an issue.
the system: 2.6.9-11.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri May 20 18:25:30 EDT 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux CentOS 4
Thanks, Manuel