[clamav-users] Clam updates failing

[Paul Kosinski]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2021 18:47:01 +0000
"Joel Esler (jesler)" <jesler at cisco.com> wrote:

> > On Oct 22, 2021, at 14:16, Paul Kosinski via clamav-users <clamav-users at lists.clamav.net> wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, 22 Oct 2021 13:27:46 +0000
> > "Joel Esler \(jesler\) via clamav-users" <clamav-users at lists.clamav.net> wrote:
> >   
> >>> On Oct 21, 2021, at 18:55, Kenneth Porter <shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> On 10/21/2021 10:14 AM, Paul Kosinski via clamav-users wrote:    
> >>>> I've never seen a DNS age warning, but that might be because, for several years now, I only run freshclam when the DNS TXT record (which I check hourly) says there is a new signature available compared to a local file's version number (in its header).    
> >>> 
> >>> I thought freshclam did the DNS check itself. Why do it again before running freshclam?    
> >> 
> >> It does.  No need to do an extra check.  
> > 
> > 
> > Since checking the DNS TXT record costs almost nothing (and is UDP), I figure I can do it more often than running freshclam without ever risking triggering Cloudflare's bandwidth limits. And, although I currently do it only once per hour, if there ever was something like a SANS Threat Level RED, I could up the frequency to get the latest sigs ASAP.
> > 
> >   
> 
> DNS is unrestricted.  That’s why I am saying it’s unnecessary.  The restrictions are on the files themselves.  


So you're saying that if -- because I wanted to get an update ASAP in the face of a severe virus alert -- I upped the running of freshclam to every 5 minutes on each of my 3 systems, there is no chance that I would be blocked, because freshclam doesn't do any actual (restricted) file access until after it checks the DNS TXT record?

Even if that's the case, I think it would generate a lot more junk in the log files than my current approach does (since I run freshclam with the "-v" option).