cPanel/WHM and yum-updatesd

In my continuing fight with yum-updatesd, I found that on servers with cPanel/WHM installed it was crashing with mysterious Python errors:

root@tma03 [/etc/yum]# yum-updatesd –debug –no-fork
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/sbin/yum-updatesd”, line 35, in ?
import dbus
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/__init__.py”, line 1, in ?
from _dbus import *
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/_dbus.py”, line 48, in ?
from proxies import *
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/proxies.py”, line 2, in ?
import introspect_parser
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/introspect_parser.py”, line 1, in ?
import libxml2
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/libxml2.py”, line 215
pass
^
TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation

In the end, I fixed this by forcing a re-install of the dbus-python and libxml2-python RPMs from the official CentOS mirrors. In my case, this was:

rpm –force -hUv http://mirrors.freethought-internet.co.uk/centos/5/os/x86_64/CentOS/dbus-python-0.70-7.el5.x86_64.rpm http://mirrors.freethought-internet.co.uk/centos/5/os/x86_64/CentOS/libxml2-python-2.6.26-2.1.2.8.x86_64.rpm

Adjust using your mirrors, distribution, version, architecture and RPM revision as appropriate.
Also, always remember to check for updates after manually re-installing RPMs from the OS repository.

I have no idea what cPanel/WHM does to break Python like this or if updates to cPanel are going to break yum-updatesd again in the future, but I have fixed this on several cPanel 11.25 boxes now!
I know cPanel likes to mess with system files, but these RPMs aren’t in the exclude list that the cPanel installer adds to /etc/yum.conf and forcing a re-installation of them seems to fix yum-updatesd.