On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Holger Parplies <wbppc AT parplies DOT de> 
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Moorcroft, Mark (ARC-TS)[ERC, Inc.] wrote on 2014-10-24 03:12:17 +0000 
> [[BackupPC-users] lastlog]:
>> Can someone please put the situation in Linux with not filtering
>> /var/log/lastlog (sparse file) somewhere in the docs. It comes back to
>> bite me every few years and I waste a bunch of time figuring out why rsync
>> keeps aborting. Or for that matter just hard code ignoring that file.
>
> oh, yes, great idea! Let me see ...
>
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 293168 Jan 31  2014 /var/log/lastlog
>
> Yes, seems I should suffer from having an arbitrary file I might want in my
> backups being silently ignored without an option to turn it off. That's
> definitely a solution far superior to requiring people to configure their
> backups correctly. All database files should also be ignored. They might also
> be sparse, and people should probably back them up in a different way. Most
> of the time. Well sometimes. As far as I want to think right now.
>
> </sarcasm>

You might temper the sarcasm a bit if you also mentioned the
alternative which is to have your whole backup fail completely without
an obvious reason and/or filling a huge amount of archive space,
crowding out stuff that is actually useful.  But yes, appropriate
configs are the right solution.

> I believe lastlog is only a problem on 64-bit systems, and only until someone 
>  comes up with a different implementation.

I think it really is only an issue on 64-bit systems with a 'nobody'
or 'nfsnobody' account with a uid of -1.   I added the exclude a long
time ago (probably for a Centos 3.x system)  but don't think any of my
current systems (mostly Centos 5 and up) still have that problem.
Looks like the 'nfsnobody' account is uid 65534 these days.

>  As impossible as it is
> pointless.

It's not really pointless when including such a file breaks the backup
run completely.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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