Why Last-login?

[Mark Moseley]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 11:16 AM @lbutlr <kremels at kreme.com> wrote:

> On 03 Mar 2021, at 05:33, Yassine Chaouche <a.chaouche at algerian-radio.dz>
> wrote:
> >> Am I missing some reason I would need/want to keep track of that
> specific login time separately?
>
> > What about mbox files ?
>
> Is anyone foolish enough to use mbox in 2021?
>
> It's designed for dozens of kilobytes of mail. Perhaps hundreds of
> kilobytes/ It is a horrible horrible format for hundreds of megabyte of
> mail, it offers no advantages at all, and is fragile to corruption since it
> stores everything in a single file.
>
>

Specific to the 'why use last login' question, with millions of mailboxes,
walking the filesystem is more than a little onerous (having done it many
times over the years, and never remembering where I put the script from
'last time') and takes a good chunk of a day to run. We were doing
file-based last-login for a while (yeah, still needs a fs walk, but at
least is dead simple and requires no stat()'ing), till locking became an
issue (nfs). We moved to redis a couple of months ago, and now determining
things like "who hasn't logged into anything in 30 days" becomes a 1 minute
run of a python script using redis SCAN.

If you don't have a mountain of mailboxes and fs-walking isn't a problem,
then there's def less need. Which means you don't have management
repeatedly asking for 'active mailboxes' ;)
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