Help: my /var/log/lastlog's as big as Canarsie!

[montefin <montefin@finux.com>]

Hi,

Has anyone else encountered this situation?

I was looking at my /var/log directory and this popped out at me

-rw-rw-r--   1 root     utmp       18692964 May 17 04:19 lastlog

I'm still tweaking a recent upgrade from Slink to Potato, so I guess I
do a lot of su - logins, but still isn't that an enormous file for its
purpose?

'man lastlog' does have a cautionary statement about wide gaps in uid
#'s slowing down the time it takes for lastlog to print to screen when a
user logs in.

And, as a consequence of having qmail installed I do have huge gaps in
uid's because Debian requires the 7 qmail uid's to be 64010 to 64016.
Could this have any bearing on the huge size of the log file?

Also, I did an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' earlier in the day and got broken
'libpam0g-0.72-7', 'libpam-modules-0.72-7' and 'libpam-runtime-0.72-7'
packages. Later I did a successful 'apt-get upgrade' on those 3 packages
which were by then upgraded to version '0.72-8'. I do know the libpam
upgrades affected files related to '/var/log/lastlog' such as 'login'
and 'passwd'. Could that have any bearing on its huge size? 

Even so, is there some command I can issue to flush the log so I can
keep it in proportion? Or will some regular process eventually reduce
the size of /var/log/lastlog and free up that disk space?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

montefin