[clamav-users] Freshclam - can't apply latest patch 26246

[clamav.mbourne at spamgourmet.com]

G.W. Haywood via clamav-users wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> On Wed, 28 Jul 2021, Lee, Raymond wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 11:16 AM Asenova, Elia wrote:
>>>
>>> ... when running freshclam I get the following errors ...
>>> Downloaded 22 patches for daily, which is fewer than the 37 expected 
>>> patches.
>>> We'll settle for this partial-update, at least for now.
>>> ERROR: cdiff_apply: lseek(desc, -350, SEEK_END) failed
>>
>> I ran into this same problem and just deleted 
>> /var/lib/clamav/daily.c[lv]d
>> and ran freshclam again.
> 
> If that doesn't help, check that the timeouts in your configuration
> file for freshclam aren't very short.  A long time ago the default was
> 30 seconds I think, but that's too short now - the default now is to
> have no timeout at all.  Until the recent updates to main and daily I
> had ReceiveTimeout set to 1800 seconds.  Even that was too short here,
> so I've now set it to 3600 seconds.

Unfortunately, it seems the ClamAV package from the Ubuntu 18.04 
repositories still has a 30 second timeout by default.  Having been 
bitten by this myself when first installing ClamAV a few months ago, and 
discussed on this list, I reported it on Ubuntu's bug tracker 
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/clamav/+bug/1927777>.  But 
they seem reluctant to remove the timeout as an update to a stable 
release (preferring that pretty much everyone installing the package 
gets a non-functional default configuration?) and don't consider it a 
problem since there's an "easy workaround" (well, it's easy once you 
figure out that their default configuration has a stupidly short timeout!)

The ClamAV maintainers can't do much about Ubuntu's update policy, of 
course, but it does seem to have lead to a lot of issues discussed here, 
particularly after the recent update to the main database.

-- 
Mark.