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ClamAV Forced Upgrade Breaks Email Servers

Posted by kdawson on from the on-the-half-shell dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A couple of weeks ago Sourcefire announced end-of-life for version 0.94 of its free ClamAV antivirus package (and in fact has been talking about it for six months). The method that Sourcefire chose to retire 0.94 was to shut down the server that provided its service. Those who had failed to upgrade are scrambling now. Many systems have no choice but to disable virus checking in order to continue to process email. I am very glad I saw the announcement last week!"

4 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Got This Bounce This Morning by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Informative

    Diagnostic-Code: smtp;
    451-4.5.0 Error in processing, id=02792-02, virus_scan FAILED: virus_scan: ALL VIRUS SCANNERS FAILED: ClamAV-clamd av-scanner FAILED: CODE(0x83d7540) Too many retries to talk to /var/spool/amavisd/clamd.sock (Can't connect to UNIX socket /var/spool/amavisd/clamd.sock: No such file or directory) at (eval 55) line 310.

    ClamAV-clamscan av-scanner FAILED: /usr/bin/clamscan unexpected exit 50, output="LibClamAV Error: cli_hex2str(): Malformed hexstring: This ClamAV version has reached End of Life! Please upgrade to version 0.95 or later.

    At least their error messages are descriptive and informative.

  2. EOL annountment from Oct 2009 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    End of Life Announcement: ClamAV 0.94.x
    Oct 5, 2009

    All ClamAV releases older than 0.95 are affected by a bug in freshclam which prevents incremental updates from working with signatures longer than 980 bytes.
    You can find more details on this issue on our bugzilla (see bug #1395)

    This move is needed to push more people to upgrade to 0.95 .
    We would like to keep on supporting all old versions of our engine, but unfortunately this is no longer possible without causing a disservice to people running a recent release of ClamAV.
    The traffic generated by a full CVD download, as opposed to an incremental update, cannot be sustained by our mirrors.

    We plan to start releasing signatures which exceed the 980 bytes limit on May 2010.

    We recommend that you always run the latest version of ClamAV to get optimal protection, reliability and performance.

    Thanks for your cooperation!

  3. Re:[clamav-announce] by entrigant · · Score: 5, Informative

    announce lists are intentionally very low traffic. I'm subscribed to over 50, and I rarely receive more than 4 or 5 mails a week at most.

  4. Re:Alternative by CoolQ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Uh, it HAS been filling your log files with warnings about upgrading for months, if not years. It's pretty f'ing explicit:

    LibClamAV Warning: *** This version of the ClamAV engine is outdated. ***
    LibClamAV Warning: *** DON'T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/support/faq ***

    --Quentin