ClamAV crashing?

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, May 15, 2008, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>Hey all,
>
>Has anyone else experienced continual crashing of clamd in recent weeks?  I'm 
>having to clear the .dblock and restart clamav-daemon up to multiple-times 
>per day of late.  I've never run into this type of persistent issue with Clam 
>before.
>
>Anyone else seeing this?

We are running clamav-0.93 at quite a few sites, with a variety
of Linux distributions ranging from SuSE Pro 9.0 to CentOS 5.1
with no significant problems.  I have seen three cases between
April 23rd and May 9th where out service checking scripts had to
restart clamav after an abnormal failure.

There is an issue, which I have been meaning to patch for months,
in which processes that check for the existence of the clamav.pid
file will think clamav is not running because the startup
procedure doesn't create that file until all the databases have
been read which can take quite a while.  If one has scripts
monitoring the clamav daemon more frequently than it takes to get
the clamav.pid file written, it can result in multiple instances
running.

Bill
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