On Apr 13,  5:39am, Christos Zoulas wrote:
} On Nov 21,  2:55am, jnemeth@victoria.tc.ca (John Nemeth) wrote:
} 
} |      Do we really care about people doing the wrong thing.  It is next
} | to impossible to protect the system from incompetent admins.  I don't
} | think we should greatly complicate the system just on the off chance
} | that an admin might do something silly.  Especially since making
} | lastlogx a db would greatly increase its size for the people that do
} | the right thing and leave it alone.  I.e. this would actually penalise
} | people that do the right thing, which would be bad.
} 
} Considering how sparse files work, a db file might be smaller (I
} think the way it works is that you need to allocate BLKSIZE on each
} block you write). These days it is not uncommon to have uids in

     That sounds right.

} the 20 thousand range. Sparse files are still not commonly used in

     UIDs on most systems normally only use a couple of ranges, so I
don't think there would bw much wastage.

} unix, and it could be mystifying to the uniniated to have a 40G
} file in a 1G disk. I agree that you cannot prevent a stupid person

     Then, I guess they have an opportunity to learn something new :-)

} from doing stupid things. OTOH, db is part of libc, and the penalty
} for using it is minimal...

     It is a heck of a lot more complicated then seek and read...

}-- End of excerpt from Christos Zoulas