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freshclam: Setting up auto-updating

freshclam is a default database updater for Clam AntiVirus. It may work in two modes: When started by a superuser it drops privileges and by default switches to the clamav user. freshclam uses the database.clamav.net round-robin DNS which automatically selects a database mirror2.8. freshclam is advanced tool: supports proxy servers (with authentication), digital signature verification and various error scenarious. Quick test: run freshclam (as a superuser) with no parameters and check the output. If everythin is OK, you may create a log file in /var/log (owned by clamav or another user freshclam is running as (-user):
	# touch /var/log/clam-update.log
	# chmod 600 /var/log/clam-update.log
	# chown clamav /var/log/clam-update.log
Now you can start freshclam in the daemon mode:
	# freshclam -d -c 6 -l /var/log/clam-update.log
This enables checking for a new database six times per day (and this is a minimal suggested value). You should add that line to your startup scripts. The other way is to use the cron daemon. You have to add the following line to the crontab of root or clamav:
0 * * * *	/usr/local/bin/freshclam --quiet -l /var/log/clam-update.log
to check for a new database every hour. To setup proxy support you may set the environment variable $http_proxy:
	export http_proxy="my.proxy.server:8080"
or use -http-proxy and -proxy-user options.


next up previous contents
Next: freshclam: Mirrors and mirrors.txt Up: Installation Previous: Testing   Contents
Tomasz Kojm 2003-11-11