I searched on the web for this error message and found the following suggestion on
http://lists.clamav.net/message/20060503.044340.42218713.en.html"I ran into this issue on one of three servers I upgraded to 0.88.2
today. After running your trace, it was obvious that another process had
the logfile already open for writing. An inspection via ps -ef | grep
freshclam revealed a previous run was hung in some fashion. Killing the
previous process cleared things up.
regards,
jim"
I found that I had the following process running since 1st May when my problems arose:
[root@server1 clamav]# ps -ef|grep freshclam
qmailq 24275 24274 0 May01 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/freshclam --quiet
I issued the command
kill 24275
to stop this process, and now I get the (expected) results from running:
[root@server1 clamav]# /usr/bin/freshclam -v
Current working dir is /usr/share/clamav
Max retries == 6
ClamAV update process started at Sat May 6 23:27:33 2006
Querying current.cvd.clamav.net
TTL: 900
Software version from DNS: 0.88.2
main.cvd version from DNS: 38
main.cvd is up to date (version: 38, sigs: 51206, f-level: 7, builder: tkojm)
daily.cvd version from DNS: 1445
daily.cvd is up to date (version: 1445, sigs: 3085, f-level: 8, builder: ccordes)
Freeing option list...done
where previously I just got the error message.
I can now confirm that this has stopped the irritating message every 2 hours, and freshclam has now successfully collected updated signatures on the 2 hourly shedule.
This leaves open the question as to why the freshclam process failed to stop on 1st May, and why subsequent invocations do not attempt to kill the previous one. However, it is possible that the problem coincided with my manual installation of the upgrade which would be plain bad luck!