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/