Freshclam daemon not running

Normally, I have two things on every Linux box so that I know whats going on

1. NAGIOS monitoring (nrpe)
2. Logwatch

Today, I got something in my logwatch email and it was strange because just the other day, I upgraded the clamav to latest version using epel reo.

 --------------------- clam-update Begin ------------------------

 The ClamAV update process (freshclam daemon) was not running!
 If you no longer wish to run freshclam, deleting the freshclam.log
 file will suppress this error message.

 ---------------------- clam-update End -------------------------

It appears that the latest version has some permission issues on the log file because when I try to run freshclam on command line I get this

root@cpanel [~]# freshclam
ERROR: Can't open /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log in append mode (check permissions!).
ERROR: Problem with internal logger (UpdateLogFile = /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log).

The solution?

The solution is very simple 🙂 just do the following

touch /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log
chown clamav /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log
chmod 666 /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log

and after that, run freshclam (the service that updates the virus-definition for clamav)

root@cpanel [~]# freshclam