On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 at 11:38:17 -0400, Peter A Farago wrote: > I recently switched from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2. At the same > time I upgraded to clamav 0.80. I have been using 'clamscan /' to scan > my system in cron.daily. I am now running the clamd daemon and have > changed from to 'clamscan /' to 'clamdscan /'. > > I am getting "access denied" messages from clamdsan. I guess this is > not surprising since I have not changed the user=clamav in clamd.conf. > If I change the user=root then the scan completes as expected. > > I had the same problem with clamav 0.75 on Fedora Core 2 but clamdscan > 0.75 works without a "user=" line in clamav.conf under Fedora Core 1. > > My questions are: > > 1) is it necessary to set user=root in clamd.conf to scan / and, if > not, please describe any better alternatives > 2) can clamdscan damage my system if I run clamd as root (assuming that > clamdscan and clamd have not been tampered with) >
I don't know Fedora (was that the monster which Japan Gozilla fought with? ;-), so I'm not giving the straight answer... First of all, you earn almost nothing when you replace clamscan with clamdscan for scanning many files at once. Clamdscan saves you time and resources when invoked again and again, every time for every file (like scanning email messages in transit). When you invoke 'clamscan /', the executable is run one time and the database is loaded one time anyway, so there's no need to use clamdscan for scannning '/'. Can clamdscan damage anything when clamd is run as root?... There are no known exploits, but one should always use only minimal priviliges to do a task, and separate users. That's why you don't run HTTPD, DNS server etc. as root, do you? End email can be especially dangerous as the data depends on sending users very much. -- Tomasz Papszun SysAdm @ TP S.A. Lodz, Poland | And it's only [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lodz.tpsa.pl/iso/ | ones and zeros. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ClamAV.net/ A GPL virus scanner _______________________________________________ http://lists.clamav.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/clamav-users
