Comment 11 for bug 564476

> I somehow doubt this 'fix' will do much, since the
> error one should have gotten if there was a problem
> with opening in append mode would be something
> completely different than an XML-RPC error.

No -- the error makes sense actually. What happens is something like this:
 - the timestamp file starts out as a valid timestamp (e.g. "1285710078")
 - denyhosts updates it, **appending** to it, yielding a timestamp with twice the normal amount of digits.
   (e.g. "12857100781285710679" in my case)
 - The next time denyhosts sends a request to the server, it asks for all the changes since this gigantic timestamp, and that causes the long int OverflowError described in the initial comment here.

So I think everything makes sense here. I've just applied the suggested workaround to one of my own servers, but I haven't verified whether it's worked yet.