How to clean up wtmp files that grow too big on RHEL3?
Environment
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL3)
Issue
The file /var/log/wtmp
grows fast and takes too much disk space
Resolution
logrotate handles the rotation of /var/log/wtmp
. As wtmp is not owned by a specific package, its logrotate configuration is not in /etc/logrotate.d
but directly in /etc/logrotate.conf
.
Here is the default configuration:
/var/log/wtmp {
monthly
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}
To make wtmp rotate more frequently (therefore preventing it to grow too much) change the frequency of the rotation from monthly to weekly and/or set a size-based threshold for rotation.
You might want to take measures for backing up old wtmp files and/or increase the number of old copies kept by logrotate. See logrotate(8) for details.
Root Cause
The default logrotate configuration might not be ideal for your system's usage pattern (login frequency).
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