[CentOS] Fwd: ABRT Daemon/sosreport disaster

Thu Aug 20 00:31:30 UTC 2015
Robert Inder <robert at interactive.co.uk>

On Sunday, I did a "yum update" which installed kernel
2.6.32-573.3.1.el6.i686 on half a dozen virtual machines running
CentOS 6.7.

Since then, two of them have gone into "meltdown", and started spewing
"ABRT Daemon" emails: one on Tuesday, and one tonight.

The machines have a very light workload -- one runs "trac", and a handful
of development systems, for a small team of developers.  The other is
primarily a git repository.
So, aside from housekeeping jobs, both machines are more-or-less idle.

Both machines generated SEVERAL HUNDRED "ABRT Daemon: a crash has been
detected again" email messages in something over an hour.

(That said, one of the two machines sent a (single) "crash detected":
it had the same "missing module" error message, but only one message
was generated)

I include a sample message below.

When I logged on to the machines when they were in "mailing frenzy",
the only processes that "top" showed me using any CPU were "sosreport"
and "abrtdaemon".
They seemed to be vying for "top spot".

In each case, I rebooted the machine, and all is now calm.  But I am
worried that it will affect other, more "visible" ideas.

So,

Q1: Is this a known problem?

Q2: And how do I stop this happening again?
      Roll back to a previous version of something?
      Disable abrt?
      What?

Robert.

----------

abrt_version:   2.0.8
cmdline:        /usr/bin/python
/usr/libexec/abrt-action-generate-machine-id -o
/var/spool/abrt/pyhook-2015-08-18-10:33:29-10484/machineid
executable:     /usr/libexec/abrt-action-generate-machine-id
hostname:       XXX.XXXXXXXXXXX.co.uk
kernel:         2.6.32-573.3.1.el6.i686
last_occurrence: 1439890409
time:           Tue 18 Aug 2015 10:33:44 BST
uid:            0

backtrace:
:abrt-action-generate-machine-id:24:<module>:ImportError: No module
named argparse
:
:Traceback (most recent call last):
:  File "/usr/libexec/abrt-action-generate-machine-id", line 24, in <module>
:    from argparse import ArgumentParser
:ImportError: No module named argparse
:
:Local variables in innermost frame:
:__builtins__: <module '__builtin__' (built-in)>
:__file__: '/usr/libexec/abrt-action-generate-machine-id'
:__package__: None
:sys: <module 'sys' (built-in)>
:__name__: '__main__'
:__doc__: 'This module provides algorithms for generating Machine IDs.\n'


-- 
Robert Inder,                                    0131 229 1052 / 07808 492 213
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