[clamav-users] what initiates freshclam?

[Kris Deugau]

novpenguincne via clamav-users wrote:
> I'm still experimenting with Clam and I've got 103.4 installed on an OEL 
> 7.9 box.

What is "OEL"?  I'm guessing it's some Red Hat derivative.

>  I've got freshclam configured to download new updates every 
> few hours.  I can manually run freshclam and successfully receive 
> updates and I can manually run clamscan successfully.
> 
> If I run a ps command, I see /usr/share/clamav/freshclam-sleep is 
> running so I'm assuming that this calls freshclam on the schedule.  But 
> what is launching this on startup?
> 
> There are no cronjobs configured.  When I look at my systemd services, I 
> see one named clamav-freshclam but it is disabled and not running.  I 
> expanded my search and found a total of 4 services with 'clam' in the 
> title (clamav-freshclam, clamav-clamonacc, clamd@, and clamonacc) but 
> none of them are running and they are all currently disabled.
> 
> Is it some other service that doesn't have 'clam' in the name?

"grep -r freshclam /usr/lib/systemd/ /etc/systemd/" might turn up a 
pointer to the systemd unit that manages this.  "rpm -qf 
/usr/share/clamav/freshclam-sleep" will probably tell you what package 
this file belongs to.

TBH this seems like a very odd way to manage freshclam, as systemd 
includes methods to call something like freshclam on a schedule, or 
manage it directly either in the foreground or as a traditional 
background daemon.

-kgd