ClamAV and MailScanner Bug

Rose, Bobby brose at MED.WAYNE.EDU
Thu May 5 20:50:31 IST 2005


Ok the issue has been solve though I don't understand why clamav has
issue with this when clamavmodule or sophos doesn't.
The Incoming Work Dir = /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming is softlinked to
/tmp which is a tmpfs volume. Changing it to a absolute path does fix
the issue when using clamav as the scanner.  As I mentioned before, I
used to use both Sophos and clamav as the scanners but stopped using
sophos for licensing costs.  The issue was never noticed because sophos
didn't care about the work directory and was catching what was falling
thru the cracks with clamav.   Using sophos or clamavmodule with the
Incoming Work Dir using a non-absolute path worked fine and since
Incoming Work Dir path that I was using in MailScanner.conf was the
default value, so there was never a moment that my scrutiny would have
noticed the comments for that setting. 

-=B

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Desai, Jason
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 11:25 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: ClamAV and MailScanner Bug

Julian Field wrote:
> Please tell me what the line in your /etc/MailScanner/ 
> virus.scanners.conf says about clamav. Also please check that your 
> Incoming Work Directory path has no links in it. This is by far the 
> most common error and would explain your symptoms.

Julian, I think I've suggested this before, but don't remember hearing
back from you about it.  Would it be possible for MailScanner (possibly
only once at startup) to determine the real path of the Incoming Work
Directory and use that, so that symbolic links would be allowed?

Granted, people are not reading the comments in the config file, and are
misconfiguring their servers.  But to detect and still deliver a virus
is not a good thing.  And I think with some simple code, MailScanner
could reduce the risk of such a misconfigured server.  What do you
think?

Jase

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