For what it's worth I believe I found the problem. I found
this in /var/lib/mailman/cron/crontab.in:
# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail. You can comment this one out
# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
# 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python
/var/lib/mailman/cro
n/gate_news
#
...that line wasn't commented although I had told mailman
via the admin web interface not to gate news/mail.
Anyway it's been well over 12 hours without a problem,
no wild /USR/CRON processes.
Just thought I'd post that in case anyone else runs into it.
-Mark
-----
"I know everything we've done is absolutely right and proper"
--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on MSNBC, 01/13/00
-----
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Symonds" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Debian" <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2000 6:31 PM
Subject: Perplexing mailman situation
>
> Hi, I'm a bit new to Debian so forgive me if this is
> a FAQ, but I installed mailman last night via apt-get
> and everything seemed to be working beautifully
> until I checked the machine this morning and discovered
> the filesystem was ro. The logs said that there was
> an attempt to access beyond the end of /dev/hda1
> so I ran e2fsck, fixed the errors and finally put the
> drive back in rw.
>
> Everything went smoothly until 12 hours later
> the server started dying and I noticed the average load
> had begun climbing through the roof. A ps aux revealed
> about 100 instances of /USR/CRON running!
