Bezerk Mailman Loose In My System!
Ed Skinner
plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Thu, 24 Oct 2002 16:00:58 -0700
I thought postal employees with AK-47s were limited to government
employment but it appears one is loose in my system.
Recently, logrotate has seemed to go hog-wild on my RH 7.1 system,
running for hours and hours. Poking around in /var/log I discovered that
/var/log/mailman had a *LOT* of stuff: a simple 'ls' sat and thought for
several minutes before starting to list filenames (named error*, where * is
like 1.2.2.3.1...) that seemed to go on forever. After aborting that, I tried
'ls | wc -l' and found out there were 221758 files in that directory. I
'cat'd one of them and found it to be empty.
(If you're into the crazy mailman theme, think of the empty files as
shell casings strewn about the floor. [Not very humorous these days.])
Feeling cavalier, I tried 'rm -f error*' but got the complaint 'bash:
/bin/rm: Argument list too long'. [Cool!]
I've killed off logrotate for the moment but obviously something is
wrong. Anyone know:
A) What might be wrong? ('man mailman' was NFG and I didn't find
'mailman' in the man pages for mail, sendmail or fetchmail, -- I'm using
kmail as my mail reader but, there again, found no reference to 'mailman' so
I'm stumped as to who creates the entries in /var/log/mailman), and
B) A "quickie" for removing the quarter million error files? (What would
you think of 'rm -rf /var/log/mailman; mkdir /var/log/mailman' and make sure
I get owner, group and permissions set back correctly again?)
I'll be hiding behind the mail bags until I hear from you.
--
Ed Skinner, ed@flat5.net, http://www.flat5.net/