Clamav Freshclam Update Definitions

Aug 28, 2018

as the ClamAV arch linux wiki states, ClamAV is:

Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. Because ClamAV’s main use is on file/mail servers for Windows desktops, it primarily detects Windows viruses and malware with its built-in signatures.

In order to update the definitions correctly is important to run first

 freshclam

which should then start the update

 ClamAV update process started at Tue Aug 28 01:16:43 2018
 Downloading main.cvd [100%]
 main.cvd updated (version: 58, sigs: 4566249, f-level: 60, builder: sigmgr)
 Downloading daily.cvd [100%]
 daily.cvd updated (version: 24880, sigs: 2066436, f-level: 63, builder: neo)
 Downloading bytecode.cvd [100%]
 bytecode.cvd updated (version: 327, sigs: 91, f-level: 63, builder: neo)
 Database updated (6632776 signatures) from database.clamav.net (IP: )

But then an error came up saying that:

 WARNING: Clamd was NOT notified: Can't connect to clamd through /run/clamav/clamd.ctl: No such file or directory

which left me unsure what could have been the issue.

Googling about it returned among many of the results, some as in Can’t connect to Unix socket /var/run//clamav/clamd.ctl, which dealt with the issue.

The error here in which it dealt with clamd.ctl and not with clamd.sock connect () as it was posted on the entry entitled Error Clamd was not notified.

But after running

  freshclam

I had already forgotten to start/enable clamav-freshclam.service as outlined on the Wiki ClamAV updating database

so

 systemctl start clamav-freshclam.service
 systemctl enable clamav-freshclam.service

Which returned:

Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/clamav-freshclam.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/clamav-freshclam.service.

Later on by calling the status of that service with

 systemctl status clamav-freshclam.service

returned

 Aug 28 01:23:43  systemd[1]: Started ClamAV virus database upda>
 Aug 28 01:23:43  freshclam[]: ClamAV update process started>
 Aug 28 01:23:43  freshclam[]: main.cvd is up to date (versi>
 Aug 28 01:23:43  freshclam[]: daily.cvd is up to date (vers>
 Aug 28 01:23:43  freshclam[]: bytecode.cvd is up to date

But whether it would be necessary to enable it every time it restarts, it’s something that I will deal with later on. I only needed it this time around to check some files, and that was the purpose of running it in the first place.