How To Install ClamAV Antivirus On CentOS

This brief guide explains how to install and use the ClamAV antivirus to protect your Linux server or desktop. ClamAV is an open source antivirus software for detecting viruses and malware on Linux platforms. It designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon.

Features

• Licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2 ;
• POSIX compliant, portable ;
• Fast scanning ;
• Supports on-access scanning (Linux and FreeBSD only).

Install ClamAV in CentOS

For demonstration purpose, we are using Centos 6.4 64bit edition. Before we can do proceed, you must ensure that you have the EPEL yum repository enabled. To do this, do the following:

a) Check architecture

# uname -a

b) Know OS version

# cat /etc/redhat-release

For more details to know about your distribution version and architecture, refer the following guide.

• Find out the Linux distribution name, version and Kernel details

c) Now enable EPEL  repository

CentOS 6.x 32-bit:

# rpm –ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

CentOS 6.x 64-bit:

# rpm –ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

d) Check the repository list.

# yum repolist

Now Install ClamAV as shown below.

1 - Install required ClamAV packages

 # yum install clamav clamd

2 - Start the clamd service and set it to auto-start

# /etc/init.d/clamd on

# chkconfig clamd on

# /etc/init.d/clamd start

3 - Update the virus definitions database using command:

# /usr/bin/freshclam

Note: ClamAV will update automatically, as part of /etc/cron.daily/freshclam.)

4 - Set the cron job on a daily / hour / weekly to perform scan . In below example , we are going to create a cronjob on daily  to scan the folder /home/

# vi /etc/cron.daily/dailyscan

#!/bin/bash
SCAN_DIR="/home"
LOG_FILE="/var/log/clamav/dailyscan.log"
/usr/bin/clamscan -i -r $SCAN_DIR >> $LOG_FILE

5 - Set the executable permission

# chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/dailyscan

Reference links:

• ClamAV website
• ClamAV manual