[clamav-users] Starting clamd

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, August 16, 2022 4:13:55 PM EDT John wrote:
> I apologise in advance if this question is trivial but I am getting
>  very lost.
> 
> I have been running clamav as part of my mailer's anti-spam system for
> years.  More recently I started using the Debian package rather that a
> self-build (mainly because clamav requires an increase of support
> code) but I am having trouble starting it. In particular it reports
> 
> Starting ClamAV daemon: Tue Aug  9 16:36:00 2022 -> !LOCAL: Socket file
> /var/run/clamav/clamd could not be bound: Permission denied
> Tue Aug  9 16:36:00 2022 -> *Closing the main socket.
> 
> I have tried changing ownership/permissions on /var/run/clamav with no
> noticeable affect.  In the past I had to change ownership to Debian-exim
> but that does not seem sufficient.
> 
> What should I do next?  I get the same error for a couple of versions,
> 103 and 104 I think.

If you're using Debian packages on the current stable release, the default for 
the clamd socket is:

LocalSocket /run/clamav/clamd.ctl

I would suggest checking what you have in /etc/clamav/clamd.conf

Currently /var/run and /run should be symlinked, so either should work.  It is 
owned by the clamav user and the root group:

drwxr-xr-x  2 clamav        root            60 Aug  1 11:34 clamav

If you are running using sysv init and there is a /etc/default/clamav-daemon 
file, it's sourced by the init script and will override what's in the clamd 
config file.

I think you are hunting in the right area of the likely problem, but there's 
some additional things you can check.

Scott K