After updating the kernel this morning to 2.6.32.41-4.art i started getting this message below every hour. Any Ideas? I was not getting these from the 2.6.32.41-1.art version only after the update like i mentioned.

This is a bug in mcelog from Redhat. Redhat has said they will not fix this bug, so we recommend you disable it.

Here are the facts:
1) mcelog only exists on x86_64, i386 users would never run into this
2) Newer OSes, built for newer kernels, like EL6 (Centos 6 when its out, Scientific Linux now) will work just fine.

So long term if you need mcelog from Redhat, upgrade to EL6 and all will be well, or downgrade your kernel.

Basically the mcelog in EL5/Centos 5 is so old it was written for a very old kernel. The newer Linux kernels change things, and the older redhat code doesnt work with the newer kernels. Redhat has also said they will not fix their version of mcelog, and that you should upgrade to EL6 if you want to use a newer kernel.

A newer version of mcelog should work too, so if you really need it, just grab the src rpm from fedora and build it, or grab the one off sourceforge and roll your own.

Or just disable mcelog, its just going to try to find bad RAM, bad CPUs, etc. and to be honest I havent ever seen that stop bad HW from doing bad things.

Thanks guys, i just ended up deleting the cron for it out of etc/cron.hourly/*

I did'nt even notice it was installed on the box neither nor noticed that it had a cron or even what the hell it was until i updated this morning and started getting the notice.

BTW, the mcelog on sourceforge seems to work fine on EL5/Centos5. My best guess is that this is an actual bug in redhats code in mcelog (and I can see from their bug tracker that other people have reported it, and they close it as NOTABUG, without a fix). I say this because we cant even find that string in the SF version, so maybe this is something RH added in?

I had the exact same problem on all boxes.

I just did a yum remove mcelog. Hope I want be having a problem again with it.

Maybe you could add a newer version of mcelog to the asl-2.0 channel, since it ships a kernel that apparently isn't compatible with the version of mcelog distributed by the OS?

Indications are that this is not required or particularly useful.
1. remove the cron job (easy)
2. attempt yum remove mcelog (should this command work?)
3. how to "disable?"

I have no problem with option 1 above if this is advised to someone like me who knows nothing about what this function actually is.

My advice, just remove the cronjob. yum remove should work, but offhand I dont recall if it has any other dependencies and if removing it would break anything else (probably not, but I dont know for sure either).

The error from the cronjob is harmless, so leaving mcelog installed wouldnt hurt anything, it seems the real issue is the annoying emails from the cronjob. So my advice is to just remove the cronjob (thats the safest solution).

Done & Thank you.

I can confirm that just removing the mcelog package is safe as well. I think it might be good if ASL checked for an incompatible version of mcelog though (and optionally provided a compatible replacement version).