ClamAV 0.83 Upgrade

I upgraded Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) from version 0.80 release 2.0 to version 0.83 release 1.0 using the rpm packages provided by Dag Wieers at http://dag.wieers.com/packages/clamav. When I tried upgrading the virus database package I received the message below:

# rpm --upgrade clamav-db-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm
warning: clamav-db-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
error: Failed dependencies:
       clamav-db = 0.80-2.0.rh9.rf is needed by (installed) clamav-0.80-2.0.rh9.rf

I then remembered I need to install all four clamav packages: clamav, clamav-db, clamav-milter, and clamd together (I'm using clamav-milter to scan email passing through sendmail). When I upgraded all four packages at once, I received warnings that new configuration files were given a .rpmnew name, since I had existing .conf configuration files.

# rpm --upgrade clamav-db-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm clamav-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm clamd-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm clamav-milter-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm
warning: clamav-db-0.83-1.0.rh9.rf.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
warning: /var/clamav/daily.cvd created as /var/clamav/daily.cvd.rpmnew
warning: /var/clamav/main.cvd created as /var/clamav/main.cvd.rpmnew
warning: /etc/freshclam.conf created as /etc/freshclam.conf.rpmnew
warning: /etc/clamd.conf created as /etc/clamd.conf.rpmnew

When I sent a test message to an account on the system and looked at the message headers, I saw "X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.80/727/Fri Feb 25 12:12:36 2005" in the mesage indicating the old version was being used for scanning. I updated the virus definitions with freshclam and restarted the clamav milter after checking the version of freshclam.

# freshclam -V
ClamAV 0.83/790/Sat Mar 26 10:27:17 2005
# /etc/init.d/clamav-milter restart

Stopping Clamav Milter Daemon:                             [  OK  ]
Starting Clamav Milter Daemon:                             [  OK  ]

Then when I sent a test message and viewed its headers, I could see it had been scanned with the version I just installed, since I saw the following in the headers:

X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV version 0.83,
     clamav-milter version 0.83 on frostdragon.com

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Building RPMs

The Red Hat Package Manager (RPM ) is a tool that automates the installation and uninstallation of software on a Linux system and allows you to more easily manage installed software. The rpm command works with software packaged into rpm files. You can use the rpm command with rpm files to determine what other software is required prior to installing the new software, i.e. you can see the "dependencies" of the new software. You can use the rpm command to easily obtain details on all software installed on a system that was installed via an rpm package. For instance rpm -a will show a list of all installed packages. If I was interested in only packages related to Clamav, a free antivirus scanner, I could filter the output with grep, e.g. rpm -a | grep clamav. I might then see the following on a system:

$rpm -qa | grep clamav
clamav-db-0.80-2.0.rh9.rf
clamav-0.80-2.0.rh9.rf
clamav-milter-0.80-2.0.rh9.rf

I could get details for one of those packages, clamav, with rpm -qi clamav.

If you wish to build your own RPM files, you can find information on how to do so at Dag Wieer's Red Hat Package Manager v4 webpage and at IBM's Packaging software with RPM webpage.

The RPM format is not restricted to just the Red Hat distributions of Linux, but is used on other Linux distributions as well, such as SuSE's and Caldera's distributions.

References:

1. Red Hat Package Manager v4
   Dag Wieers
   September 21, 2003
2. Packaging software with RPM
   Dan Poirier (poirier@us.ibm.com)
   Software engineer, IBM
   01 Nov 2001

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