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tmpwatch on RHEL

Created by dave. Last edited by dave, 17 years and 280 days ago. Viewed 3,424 times. #2
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tmpwatch is dangerous

as a heads up for those who run SRSS on RedHat Advanced Server:

RHAS installs a cron job called tmpwatch that is run daily at 4.20 in the morning that deletes all files that have not been accessed since 10 days. This destroys the state file in /tmp/SUNWut/config/displays/<DISPLAY> exactly 10 days after login because these files are obviously never touched again after the login (or their atime is not updated).

I have disabled the line that starts tmpwatch for /tmp in /etc/cron.daily and the logouts and the error messages have gone away but I think it would be better to periodically update the atime of these files because cleaning up /tmp is "A Good Thing" (tm). This could be done with a cron job but I am not sure if utxconfig relies on the time stamps of these files.

The version of tmpwatch shipped with RHAS 3 is rather ancient and does not have the nifty --exclude option. I just updated the rpm with a newer one from RHAS4 and inserted the --exclude option for /tmp/SUNWut. That should have fixed it for me but maybe the docs should be updated to include a warning about this?

Note: The tmpwatch version for FC3 appears to honor the -x option.

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