On 10/13/10 6:42 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 06:16:26PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 10/13/2010 6:01 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
>>> lastlog is a sparse file. How it looks and how big it is are two
>>> different things.
>>
>> And how long it takes to copy if you back the system up is a 3rd thing.
>
> Get better backup software that understands sparse files. You'll have the
> same problem with dbm files and similar.
>
>> But if you've truncated to 32 bits it might be tolerable anyway. On
>
> The bit-size of the OS is irrelevant to the maximum file size. Otherwise
> we'd still be stuck at 2Gb (maybe 4Gb) files on 32bit systems.
It isn't related to the OS maximum file size, it has to do with what happens
when you take -1 as an unsigned integer:
nfsnobody:x:4294967294:4294967294:Anonymous NFS User:/var/lib/nfs:/sbin/nologin
and then use that as the key into a sparse file the way lastlog works. Seems to
be fixed now though, I don't see the big lastlog on any of the remaining Centos3
boxes I can find.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com