Accounting shutting down?

[Ross Parker]

Hi....

I have a periodic problem on a number of Microvaxes running Ultrix
3.1 and 2.3. It appears that the system accounting is shutting itself
down for reasons other than disk space. The symptoms are as follows
(seen one day on our Microvax-3600 running 3.1):

At about 1:00 pm on a weekday with about 15 users on the system:

- /usr/adm/acct is approx 100K in size.
- df /usr reports that /usr is approx 85% full.
- sa -m reports that only 4 users had run any commands. Of these 4,
  root and daemon used by far the most time. This was a normal
  day, and there had been at least 15 users on since 9:00 am.

Then, at about 2:30 pm, on the same system:

- /usr/adm/acct is approx 450K in size.
- df /usr still reports approx 85% full.
- sa -m reports that a whole bunch of users had run commands.

We run a nightly accounting run that clears out /usr/adm/acct and
starts it from scratch (we run accton first to turn off accounting,
copy and zero the file, then run accton /usr/adm/acct to restart
accounting). This nightly accounting run takes about 2 minutes and is run
at midnight.

As mentioned, this had been a normal day, with lots of activity. Having
only 100K worth of accounting data (and only 4 users shown) by 1:00 pm
is certainly incorrect. Some time in the next 1-1/2 hours, something
happened to restart accounting, as the file grew by a reasonable amount
in that time.

I unfortunately neglected to check the error log.

This problem is happening on about 6 different systems (I'm inferring this
from the size of the accounting files on the other systems, and the results
of the daily accounting runs - the above incident is the only one I've 'caught'). It's not a disk space problem.

Does anyone have any ideas? Is there any reason that accounting will shut down
other than disk space limitations?

Dec has had this problem for about 3 weeks without results.

-- 
Ross Parker			| Why do they put me down?
				| Make out that I'm a clown?
parker at mprgate.mpr.ca		| I drink scotch whisky all day long
uunet!ubc-cs!mprgate!parker	| Yeah I'm gonna save my money
				| (gonna put it all away...)
(604)293-5495			| 'Cause I'm a Scotsman