% ls -l /var/run/[wu]tmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp  364366464 Aug 13 22:00 utmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp  1743665280 Aug 13 22:10 wtmp

That's 350 megs and 1.7 gigs. Cute. Performance sucks for anything needing utmp (w, uptime, top, etc). The 'init' process is spending tons of time chewing through cpu. System %cpu usage says 38% and is holding there on a mostly idle machine.

Lots of these in /var/log/messages:

Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6843]: tty3: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6844]: tty4: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6845]: tty5: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:27 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6846]: tty6: No such file or d
irectory
Aug 13 22:10:32 domU-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX /sbin/mingetty[6847]: tty2: No such file or d
irectory

I'm not sure why /dev/tty1 is the only /dev/ttyN device, but whatever. Either way, mingetty flapping will flood /var/run/[ubw]tmp over the span of weeks and eventually you end up with a system that spends most of its time parsing that file and/or restarting mingetty.

I fixed this by commenting out all tty entries in /etc/inittab and running "init q":

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
#1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
#2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

I left my notebook at work, so I won't be doing my defcon writeup tonight. Oh well. I leave you with this terrifying reality captured from Technorati:

So my new fancy computer is here. Turns out I originally bought the wrong formfactor motherboard, because I had a silly moment.

Either way, I've now got the system running, but not without some serious battle scars.

Ubuntu happily installed (very slow to partition/newfs stuff though). However, upon reboot, the bios clearly couldn't see the boot drive. My SATA drives are plugged into the on-board Silicon Image RAID controller with no raid configurations set up.

Guessing, I told the raid controller to create a 1-disk concatonation with the disk I wanted to boot from. Voila, the BIOS sees the one disk now and I can boot from it. Linux finds the other two SATA drives when booting.

Sigh..

Also, when Ubuntu says "Computing the new partitions" it really means "I'm creating a new partition right now. Go get something to eat, I'm going to be here for a while." Large partitions, for some reason, take quite some time to create.

I followed a webclip link out of gmail today and it dropped me off at a news story on Forbes.com. I wanted to read this story. However, I was presented with something horrific. I was presented with the results of a tragic effort that I can only presume is a scheme to show as many "punch the monkey" advertisements as possible.

What is this scheme? Well. I landed on the page. This page had two average-length paragraphs. No sooner had I finished reading the first paragraph than the page reloaded and showed me another, new piece of text.

Six seconds later. A new page.

Repeat.

Turns out Forbes.com has some sort of slideshow they try to use to display stories. To make matters worse, there are advertisements everywhere. By the time I figured out what part of the page I was supposed to be looking at, it went to the next page. Sure, you can stop the slideshow, but I only found that out afterwards.

Thanks Forbes. I almost read one of your stories.

Clicky for an example article

Thumbnail screenshot of the page follows. Enjoy the massive amount of whitespace and adspace.