Another Clamav thread

While attempting to upgade "clamav" to .88 version with the wizard I get this error:

checking for inflateEnd in -lz... yes
checking for bzReadOpen in -lbz2... no
checking bzlib.h usability... yes
checking bzlib.h presence... yes
checking for bzlib.h... yes
checking for __dn_expand in -lresolv... yes
checking resolv.h usability... yes
checking resolv.h presence... yes
checking for resolv.h... yes
checking whether setpgrp takes no argument... yes
checking for __gmpz_init in -lgmp... yes
checking for recvmsg... yes
checking for sendmsg... yes
checking for msg_accrights field in struct msghdr... no
checking for msg_control field in struct msghdr... yes
checking for gethostbyname_r... yes, and it takes 6 arguments
checking for readdir_r... support disabled
checking for ctime_r... yes, and it takes 2 arguments
checking for clamav in /etc/passwd... no
* configure: error: User clamav (and/or group clamav) doesn't exist. Please read the documentation !
***** Return value 1

So after googling I found that I need "clamav-dev to fix the /etc/passwd problem. I cannot find a "clamav-dev" for Suse 9.3 anywhere (rpm). Can anyone help me out here? Thanks.

I'm not sure this will help but try man useradd and man groupadd. That will tell you how to use those commands. Useradd will add the user you need and if you need it to have a seperate group then groupadd will do that for you.

If not, maybe someone with it installed will be able to shed more light.

Thanks for the reply.

Did that help you get it installed?

i am by far no linux wizard, however, i think i can speak for all when i say clamav is a bit 'needy' of an application. i was going to say buggy, but it's not buggy. it's just whiney.

your best bet as far as upgrading is not to use a wizard or gui. most of these gui's are, by default, junk. (not to change topics, but the gui's for transcode and mencoder -- acidrip and dvd::rip respectively -- are so crash friendly that it's mind boggling... the command line is so much nicer once you get real friendly with Mr. Cut and Paste).

anyway -- what i'm getting at is that i believe you will have more luck if you copy your clamav configuration files (this includes those for freshclam -- just in case -- you never know) to a separate directory. these are really what controls clamav. so now that those are safely aside, uninstall clamav. whipe it out completely, leaving nothing behind. if you 'yum remove NAME' or 'rpm -e NAME' it's going to want to leave little tidbits of conf files and such laying around with .rpm.save extentions (or something like that) so that if you re-install, it'll just use those. well get rid of those too.

then install the new version of clamav by whatever means you see fit, do the basic config, and then drag and dump your OLD conf files into the NEW installation directory (which will probably be the same directory as before, but that's fine).

now this is not the most eloquent way of doing it, nor is it what i would say is the 'right' way of doing it. but when all else fails, this SHOULD work.


ps -- if you don't mind me asking, why are you upgrading clamav at all? other than new virus databases (which are obviously a daily or even hourly updated thing for some people) why would you want to change the program unless a major earth shattering release was put out?