On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 09:56:10AM -0500, Pat Mahoney wrote: > The "who" command displays user james as being logged in like this: > > pat tty3 Apr 24 09:52 > james 0 Apr 19 20:24 > > User pat is logged in but james logged out sometime on april 19. Apparently > though something went wrong and the system stil lists him as logged in since > april 19. > > James owns no processes and ps aux does not reveal anything suspicious. > Anyone know how to get rid of user james?
this is usually caused by a corrupted /var/run/utmp file, i have seen this happen alot where users show up in who, and users but no in w. the only way i have found to get rid of these phantom users is to drop to single user mode and zero out /var/run/utmp (cat /dev/null > /var/run/utmp) I had a problem with this when i was using a 2.7.1 build of rxvt which was not removing entries properly, i would very soon end up with many many entries for my user since every time i loged out of X there were 5 or more rxvts being closed but not removing the utmp entries right... i have also seen this when ssh connnections are interupted abnormally. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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