Freshclam issues – Uno-Code

I’ve been noticing more and more of these messages being sent to me via logcheck on a few servers. It appears that freshclam is having issues updating agains it’s mirrors.

May 24 15:17:29 comp freshclam[6353]: Mirror 64.142.100.50 is not synchronized. May 24 15:17:29 comp freshclam[6353]: Giving up on database.clamav.net... May 24 15:17:29 comp freshclam[6353]: Update failed. Your network may be down or none of the mirrors listed in freshclam.conf is working. Check http://www.clamav.net/support/mirror-problem for possible reasons.

I’ve been noticing more and more of these messages being sent to me via logcheck on a few servers. It appears that freshclam is having issues updating agains it’s mirrors.

After logging into the server, I thought I’d try manually funning freshclam to see if I can begin diagnosing the issue. My initial gut feeling is that it’s related to routing problem on the internet, or the mirrors are down. Hitting their mirror-status site, everything seems to be fine on their end. But, when I ran freshclam via CLI, this is what I saw:

$ freshclam ERROR: Problem with internal logger (UpdateLogFile = /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log).

Now, this is certainly odd, since /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log is there and writable by the user. I hit the forums a bit, and saw unrelated issues with similar messages. They didn’t totally apply to me, so I thought I’d just restart clamd to see if everything is hosed. After issuing a /etc/init.d/clamd restart, I saw now complaints and the service was up and working. I tried freshclam again… and it worked. Very odd. I just wanted to post this in case anyone experiences something similar. My guess is there was an update to freshclam or logger dependency and the restart was needed to load it up for freshclam. Hopefully this will correct the log messages.