Notifying Admins When ClamAV is Out of Date

Perhaps the most frustrating thing with using ClamAV is its frequent update cycle. It seems about every couple of weeks there is a new version of ClamAV out. Subscribing to the clamav-announce mailing list can solve this problem. However there is another way built into freshclam to handle this.

The OnOutdatedExecute directive in freshclam.conf allows the freshclam to call a script any time ClamAV is out of date. Immediately ideas spring to mind on what this script could do. At the very least, it could notify the appropriate contacts, or on the other end, it could download the tarball and its sig file, verify the signature, unpack the tarball, compile the source and install, restart the daemons and notify the admins. Freshclam-outdate is an example of such a script. It attempts to download the latest version of clamav and its sig file and notifies the admin whether the download was successful. Incorporating the other options mentioned above is an exercise for the reader. To utilize freshclam-outdate, make the following change to your freshclam.conf.

OnOutdatedExecute /path/to/freshclam-outdate %v

Then restart the freshclam daemon. The "%v" tells freshclam to include the version number as an argument after the script. For example, if the newest version was 1.00, freshclam would call the equivalent of this.

% /path/to/freshclam-outdate 1.00

Downloads

File:	freshclam-outdate
Size:	3,986 bytes
Date:	2008-05-02 14:49:56 -0700
MD5:	`8ed3f11371325b15e7eddebdce4ef065`
SHA-1:	`c7cdc7c946f230670afa87dc6441fccdfa9c69ff`
RIPEMD-160:	`17bb77b188c71a044079b3d7c2a3e6026377c4f7`
PGP Signature:	freshclam-outdate.asc