[H-GEN] Python doesn't love me anymore

[Sarah Walters]

Hi all,

I'm running mailman on my home server and it has been working fine. 
About half an hour ago I got the first of several emails from mailman 
complaining of a segmentation fault. So I tried restarting mailman and 
was getting bus errors. Eventually I realised that it wasn't mailman:

$ /usr/local/bin/python
Bus error (core dumped)

$ /usr/local/bin/python -v
<SNIP>
# /usr/local/lib/python2.4/types.pyc matches 
/usr/local/lib/python2.4/types.py
import types # precompiled from /usr/local/lib/python2.4/types.pyc
Bus error

Last few lines of a ktrace dump (I've never used this before):
 23771 python   RET   read 2561/0xa01
 23771 python   CALL  fstat(0x7,0xbfbf6bd0)
 23771 python   RET   fstat 0
 23771 python   CALL  read(0x7,0x81a4000,0x4000)
 23771 python   GIO   fd 7 read 0 bytes
       ""
 23771 python   RET   read 0
 23771 python   CALL  close(0x7)
 23771 python   RET   close 0
 23771 python   CALL  close(0x6)
 23771 python   RET   close 0
 23771 python   CALL  close(0x5)
 23771 python   RET   close 0
 23771 python   CALL  close(0x4)
 23771 python   RET   close 0
 23771 python   PSIG  SIGBUS SIG_DFL
 23771 python   NAMI  "python.core"


End of truss output:
open("/usr/local/lib/python2.4/types.py",0x0,0666) = 6 (0x6)
fstat(6,0xbfbfac10)                              = 0 (0x0)
open("/usr/local/lib/python2.4/types.pyc",0x0,0666) = 7 (0x7)
fstat(7,0xbfbfab10)                              = 0 (0x0)
read(0x7,0x81a4000,0x4000)                       = 2561 (0xa01)
fstat(7,0xbfbf6bc0)                              = 0 (0x0)
read(0x7,0x81a4000,0x4000)                       = 0 (0x0)
close(7)                                         = 0 (0x0)
close(6)                                         = 0 (0x0)
close(5)                                         = 0 (0x0)
close(4)                                         = 0 (0x0)
SIGNAL 10 (SIGBUS)
SIGNAL 10 (SIGBUS)
Process stopped because of:  16
process exit, rval = 138
Bus error


HELP!!! Why would python suddenly stop working without any reason? I'm 
baffled. Makes no difference whether I am a standard user or root. The 
timestamp on the types.pyc file hasn't changed, but the only thing I 
have thought of is someone doing something funny with a trojan given 
that python runs as root every few minutes to do mailman stuff. It's not 
world-writable though.

Any ideas?

Sarah