Fixing tacct Errors

If your installation is using the accounting system to charge users for system resources, the integrity of sum/tacct will be important to you. Occasionally, mysterious tacct records may appear with negative numbers, duplicate user IDs, or a user ID of 65,535. If this happens on your system, you can check the file this information is stored in, and patch it if necessary.

Use this procedure to check the integrity of sum/tacct and repair it, if necessary. If it looks all right, patch up the latest sum/tacct.MMDD file and then recreate sum/tacct.

1. Change to the directory /var/adm/acct/sum.

2. Check sum/tacctprev (using prtacct to print it).

3. If sum/tacctprev looks all right, run the following command:
   
   acctmerg -v < tacct.MMDD > xtacct

   where MMDD is the most recently dated file in that series.

4. Edit xtacct to remove the bad records and to write duplicate UID records to another file.

5. Write and quit the file xtacct.

6. Run the following command to create an uncorrupted tacct.MMDD file.
   
   acctmerg -i < xtacct > tacct.MMDD

7. Recreate the current sum/tacct by merging all existing tacct.MMDD files with the following command:
   
   acctmerg tacctprev < tacct.MMDD > tacct

   The monacct procedure removes all the old tacct.MMDD files.