RecentLogins

Overview

Recent logins are found by parsing the output from the last command. You can specify a list of users to exclude, so that for example a system administrator logging into the box to check things out doesn't affect the system's idleness rating.

Red Hat / CentOS Note

RHEL 4 and earlier rotated /var/log/wtmp (the database used by last) monthly. This unnecessarily discards login history on boxes with infrequent logins. We recommend you reconfigure your older RHEL/CentOS systems to rotate wtmp based on file size instead, as is now standard in RHEL 5. I.e. you will find this in /etc/logrotate.conf:

/var/log/wtmp {
    monthly
    create 0664 root utmp
    rotate 1
}

Here's the newer configuration from RHEL 5:

/var/log/wtmp {
    monthly
    minsize 1M
    create 0664 root utmp
    rotate 1
}