[Mailman-Developers] Cron error messages

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "bronto" ==   <bronto@csd-bes.net> writes:

    | Traceback (most recent call last):
    |    File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 44, in ?
    |      from Mailman import MailList
    | ValueError: bad marshal data

Because you're getting this on an import, I have to conclude that your
.pyc files are corrupt.  I've no idea why that could be (maybe you ran
out of disk space once, or have other h/w problems).

One thing you can do is to temporarily disable cron, the web
interface, and qrunner, then cd to /usr/local/mailman and run this:

% find . -name \*.pyc -print | xargs rm

Then cd back to your source directory and do a "make install".  This
will regenerate all your pyc files.  Watch carefully for any errors,
especially during the "compileall" phase.

    bronto> Since posting that, I have discovered that one of my
    bronto> mailing lists has stopped functioning to some degree.  I
    bronto> had set up this particular list to be a simple personal
    bronto> archive of messages from another mailing list I subscribe
    bronto> to.  It doesn't send anything, so I hadn't noticed any
    bronto> problems.  While doing my mailman update to 2.1b3, I
    bronto> discovered that no messages have been archived since the
    bronto> 23rd when I got the above errors.  Snooping around the
    bronto> mailman directories, I see a ton of files (several
    bronto> hundred) in the qfiles/shunt directory, dated since 9/23.
    bronto> There are also a few dozen from 7/2, FWIW.  I'm betting
    bronto> this isn't a coincidence, but know nothing more than that.

    bronto> Today at 12 noon, I received the following cron error:

    | _________________________________________
    | Traceback (most recent call last):
    |    File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 44, in ?
    |      from Mailman import MailList
    |    File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 31, in ?
    |      import urllib
    | EOFError: EOF read where object expected
    | __________________________________________

Again, that's happening on an import, but now it's while importing a
standard Python module.  That might mean that your Python installation
is corrupt in a similar way.

    bronto> Since that time, there has been a mailman process running
    bronto> taking up all available CPU cycles.  gtop shows that the
    bronto> CMD is /usr/bin/python2, FWIW.  There are a fair number of
    bronto> qrunner processes running, but my mailing lists are hardly
    bronto> active.

    bronto> What's going on here?

I don't know if those other problems are related, but you first have
to make sure those import problems go away before you can track down
any other issues.

-Barry