On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, Andrea wrote:

> Something strange is going on here... The `w`, `who` and `finger`
> programs do not seem to know about any logged-in users, even when issued
> as root:
>
> -----BEGIN SHELL I/O-----
> ~# who
> ~# w
> 01:50:04 up 6 days, 14:03,  0 users,  load average: 0.21, 0.32, 0.29
> USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
> ~# finger
> No one logged on.
> ~#
> ------END SHELL I/O------
>
> Does anyone on 5.1 get this kind of results? Does anyone know the reason?

How have they logged in ?

I've been seeing this for some logins since about RedHat 9, when we 
started using KDE, but it isn't limited to KDE.

Login processes have to register with utmp, but not all login processes
have permission to do this (essentially by writing to /var/log/wtmp). 
xterm is the program which springs to mind as sometimes not have
having permission to do this.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[log in to unmask]	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna