The following reply was made to PR bin/32903; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: khym@azeotrope.org (Dave Huang)
To: gnats-bugs@netbsd.org
Cc: netbsd-bugs@netbsd.org, i18rabbit@cwazy.co.uk
Subject: Re: bin/32903: utmp remains empty
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 01:09:45 -0600

 On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 07:00:11AM +0000, i18rabbit@cwazy.co.uk wrote:
 >  well - i never had a group "utmp" in the 2 series,
 >  and it worked fine; and "login" is running with
 >  root privileges, so i don't see how the group
 >  makes a difference.  i did add a group "utmp"
 >  as per the installation /etc directory, and
 >  modified the group name of the utmp* files,
 >  and nothing has changed - it made no difference.
 >  still, no utmp entries were made by login.
 
 Sounds like your install is pretty messed up, including your NetBSD 2.x
 install. Here's the /etc/group file from NetBSD 2.0; note that it has
 a utmp group:
 http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/etc/group?rev=1.14&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
 
 NetBSD has had a utmp group going back to version 1.0, back in 1994:
 http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/etc/group?rev=1.4&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
 
 Perhaps you should use check the owner, group, and permission of all the
 base NetBSD files... or at least find out why 1) you didn't have a "utmp"
 group and 2) why your utmp file had the wrong group and permissions.
 utmp entries definitely do get created on a properly-installed NetBSD
 system.