Clamav: Error on scan

gnurza · 03-04-2008, 04:01 AM

I've installed clamav v0.90.1 on a laptop running Debian Etch. On executing the clamscan command I'm getting the following:

LibClamAV Error: cl_load(): Unable to lock database directory: /var/lib/clamav/
ERROR: Unable to lock database directory

How do I get clamscan to complete scanning without any errors?

Thanks.

pwc101 · 03-04-2008, 04:22 AM

Are you running clamscan as an unprivileged user? The directory /var/lib/clamav is probably owned by the clamav user and the clamav group.

On my system (Slackware), the equivalent directory (/usr/share/clamav as it happens) has rwxrwx--- permissions, so only members of the clamav group, the clamav user and root have permissions to read/write there.

As a solution, you can either run clamscan as root or add yourself to the clamav group. There may also be more or less secure ways of gaining access to that directory (chmod...).

Your choice

gnurza · 03-04-2008, 05:23 AM

Thanks pwc101 for your response.

I have tried running clamscan as root but to no avail; the same error still occurs

pwc101 · 03-04-2008, 06:00 AM

Does /var/lib/clamav exist? If not, might be worth creating it as root, and then trying again. If it does exist, what is the output of

Code:

ls -l /var/lib/clamav

?

gnurza · 03-04-2008, 06:44 AM

Code:

...# ls -l /var/lib/clamav/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root   root    911975 2008-03-04 10:54 daily.cvd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root   root   8189490 2008-03-04 10:54 main.cvd
drwxr-xr-x 2 clamav clamav    4096 2008-03-04 13:50 main.inc

pwc101 · 03-04-2008, 07:27 AM

Whoops, my mistake. Can you post the output of

Code:

ls -ld /var/lib/clamav

Thanks.

gnurza · 03-04-2008, 07:39 AM

here we go...

Code:

 ls -ld /var/lib/clamav/
drwxr-xr-x 4 clamav clamav 4.0K 2008-03-04 15:39 /var/lib/clamav//

pwc101 · 03-04-2008, 08:19 AM

Hmmm. Odd. It has more open permissions than mine, and yet you get a permissions error.

The only thing I've seen about this (I did a quick google of the error message) is that it's a problem with 0.90.x installations, and upgrading to a more recent version (currently at 0.92.1) might fix it.

Or, http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.lin...general/380220 seems to suggest that if you chown all files in /var/lib/clamav to clamav:clamav, then that might also fix it.

gnurza · 03-04-2008, 08:29 AM

Thanks for your help. Changing ownership to clamav solved the problem! Yay!

pwc101 · 03-04-2008, 08:34 AM

Cool, glad it's fixed.