On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 07:00:11AM +0000, i18rabbit@cwazy.co.uk wrote:
>  well - i never had a group "utmp" in the 2 series,
>  and it worked fine; and "login" is running with
>  root privileges, so i don't see how the group
>  makes a difference.  i did add a group "utmp"
>  as per the installation /etc directory, and
>  modified the group name of the utmp* files,
>  and nothing has changed - it made no difference.
>  still, no utmp entries were made by login.

Sounds like your install is pretty messed up, including your NetBSD 2.x
install. Here's the /etc/group file from NetBSD 2.0; note that it has
a utmp group:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/etc/group?rev=1.14&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

NetBSD has had a utmp group going back to version 1.0, back in 1994:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/etc/group?rev=1.4&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

Perhaps you should use check the owner, group, and permission of all the
base NetBSD files... or at least find out why 1) you didn't have a "utmp"
group and 2) why your utmp file had the wrong group and permissions.
utmp entries definitely do get created on a properly-installed NetBSD
system.