[Mailman-Users] Mailman error emails to my root account

[Richard Barrett]

At 08:00 08/04/2003, Michael Mansour wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I have mailman v2.0.13-13 running on a production server (RH8), let's call it
>Server1.
>
>On another server (called Server2), which doesn't have mailman running but has
>it installed (it's part of the standard RH8 installation procedure), I keep
>getting the following errors emailed to my root account on that machine 
>(Server2):
>
>From: Cron Daemon  <root at server2.test.com>
>To: mailman at cheetah.npgx.com.au
>Subject: Cron  <mailman at cheetah> /usr/bin/python -S /var/mailman/cron/qrunner
>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File  "/var/mailman/cron/qrunner", line 84, in ?
>    from Mailman import Utils
>  File  "/var/mailman/Mailman/Utils.py", line 32, in ?
>    import random
>  File  "/usr/lib/python2.2/random.py", line 92, in ?
>    _verify('NV_MAGICCONST', NV_MAGICCONST, 1.71552776992141)
>  File  "/usr/lib/python2.2/random.py", line 87, in _verify
>    raise ValueError(
>ValueError: computed value for NV_MAGICCONST deviates too much (computed
>1.71553, expected
>1.71553)
>
>I've done nothing special on Server2, it's a production RAS, Radius and Squid
>server and only runs sendmail for local mail delivery.
>
>Any ideas why I'm getting such emails? there's heaps of them mailed to me each
>minute or so.
>
>Michael.

You say the machine is not running Mailman but the error refutes this.

The mail is saying that a cron job is active, which is running Mailman's 
qrunner script.

Have you checked root's crontab and what is in /etc/cron* to see what is there.

As to the actual exception being raised, this seems to arise from internal 
checking that the Python random module performs when it is loaded, but I 
cannot help you with the reasons why this exception might occur.