thanks for your replies, I will try this one, since the server is not in a production state. What would happen if it was... a simple grep eating 2 GB of RAM.... David Johnston wrote: >4) Remove the nfs-utils package, remove /var/log/lastlog, and recreate >it. This should make lastlog much smaller, unless you have a lot of >users on your system. > Les Mikesell wrote: > >>2) Change the format of lastlog so it doesn't use a sparse file. This >>isn't trivial, but I think it's probably the best solution in the long >>run (unless #1 happens). >> >> > >This is painful for most ways of backing up and cloning systems too. >How about gdbm format as something that would work with miminal >changes? > > > I dont get it. lastlog is in dbm format and if it is converted to gdbm it wont't be a sparse file anymore ?