we're sorry, we hit a bug!

Look in Mailman's error log (/usr/lib/mailman/logs/error).

Post the complete traceback and supporting information from the error log either here or to <email address hidden> <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users>.

thanks for the reply Mark.

the error that shows in the logs reads like this:
[Errno 2] no such file or directory:'/usr/lib/mailman/data/master-qurunner.pid'
- is qrunner even running?
-No child with pid:28626
-[Errno 3] no such process
-Stale pid file removed
-no child with pid:6952
-[Errno 3] no such process
-Stale pid file removed

i beleive the error above was written to the log because i restarted mailman /sbin/service mailman restart when it was off, so there was nothing to restart, thus starting it instead. thats all there is in the logs and i dont see any other errors.

any more ideas where to look? also i am using fedora 4, which is already discontinue by fedora core and does not have any supporting files anymore.so i can not install rpm's because when it looks for repositories it gives an error.

thanks.

You are correct about the source of the above error. Is the bug message still appearing when you go to the mailman/listinfo page. If so, and if there is nothing in the error log, that's very strange. However, you can enable display of the error and traceback by editing the file /user/lib/mailman/scripts/driver and changing the line

STEALTH_MODE = 1

to

STEALTH_MODE = 0

The actual error message and traceback are the only things that will enable debugging this.

thanks for your quick reply Mark,

i deleted the mailman directory and reinstall it clean as the same procedure on my first post.
this time i started the server rather than restart.
as expected the "we're sorry, we hit a bug!" error is still there.
i cat /usr/lib/mailman/logs/error and there was nothing in the file.
i stopped the server and enabled STEALTH_MODE=1 in the driver script you mention.
once again i restarted the server and check the logs for errors but it was still empty.
in addition i check the /var/run/mailman folder and it is also empty.

when i enable the stealth mode, is the the trace back log store some where else and not in the error logs file?

thanks for your quick reply Mark,

i deleted the mailman directory and reinstall it clean as the same procedure on my first post.
this time i started the server rather than restart.
as expected the "we're sorry, we hit a bug!" error is still there.
i cat /usr/lib/mailman/logs/error and there was nothing in the file.
i stopped the server and enabled STEALTH_MODE=1 in the driver script you mention.
once again i restarted the server and check the logs for errors but it was still empty.
in addition i check the /var/run/mailman folder and it is also empty.

when i enable the stealth mode, is the the trace back log store some where else and not in the error logs file?

STEALTH_MODE=1 is the default. You need to disable it with STEALTH_MODE=0. Then the error info and traceback should display on the screen instead of the

"Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited, but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs. "

message.

oh great. now i see the trace back information:

Traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/scripts/driver", line 82, in run_main
    immediate=1)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/StampedLogger.py", line 52, in __init__
    Logger.__init__(self, category, nofail, immediate)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py", line 50, in __init__
    self.__get_f()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py", line 68, in __get_f
    1)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/codecs.py", line 666, in open
    file = __builtin__.open(filename, mode, buffering)
IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/lib/mailman/logs/error'

Python information:

Variable Value
sys.version 2.4.3 (#1, Oct 23 2006, 14:19:47) [GCC 4.1.1 20060525 (Red Hat 4.1.1-1)]
sys.executable /usr/bin/python
sys.prefix /usr
sys.exec_prefix /usr
sys.path /usr
sys.platform linux2

Environment variables:

Variable Value
HTTP_COOKIE bprememberme=[not listed for privacy purpose]; Profile=200805272253530961349437053|gAME|897|PLT|en; sauidp=U774178601211992650546; CoreID6=97139707640212119926514; satst=test
SERVER_SOFTWARE Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora)
SCRIPT_NAME /mailman/listinfo
SERVER_SIGNATURE <address>Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora) Server at [not listed for privacy purpose] Port 80</address>
REQUEST_METHOD GET
HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE 300
SERVER_PROTOCOL HTTP/1.1
QUERY_STRING
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.20) Gecko/20081217 Firefox/2.0.0.20
HTTP_CONNECTION keep-alive
SERVER_NAME [not listed for privacy purpose]
REMOTE_ADDR 9.11.158.222
SERVER_PORT 80
SERVER_ADDR 9.11.243.94
DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/www/html
PYTHONPATH /usr/lib/mailman
SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo
SERVER_ADMIN root@localhost
HTTP_HOST [not listed for privacy purpose]
REQUEST_URI /mailman/listinfo
HTTP_ACCEPT text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1
REMOTE_PORT 1880
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE en-us,en;q=0.5
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING gzip,deflate

what does it all mean?

That's a secondary error. The script is unable to write the primary error to the error log for lack of permission.

Is /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo SETGID and group mailman as in

-rwxr-sr-x 1 root mailman 15997 Jun 30 2008 listinfo

Is /usr/lib/mailman/logs/error writable by the mailman group?

If all that seems OK, are you running SELinux? If so, try disabling it. See, e.g., the thread at <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-February/042289.html>.

that explains why there are no errors written to the erro log file. however, why was the error written when i restarted mailman when it was not even running?

i listed it and it is:
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root mailman 16146 Dec 30 11:13 listinfo
the mailman group has writable privileges.
i am using fedora, but i am not sure if it is using SELinux. i will follow the link you posted and disable it if its enabled.

thanks.

wao, you were right, the SELinux protection was the problem. after reading from that thread, i disabled the SELinux policy and when i restarted mailman the page actually came up.

Thank you very much, i spent so many hours on this problem and i was clueless.

best regards.

I'm glad it's working.

To answer your question "why was the error written when i restarted mailman when it was not even running?", the web server was not able to write the error log and probably had other issues because of the SELinux security policy, however when you restarted Mailman, that process was running as the user that you ran it as (possibly root?) and that user did have permission under SELinux.