Knowledgebase

ClamAV is a free and open-source antivirus suite. When planning a security strategy for your server, you may want to consider running an antivirus to protect your server.

Before we begin

• Execute all commands as root in this tutorial (or sudo).
• ClamAV is open-source and is not as powerful as other antivirus suites.

Install ClamAV

Install the ClamAV engine.

apt-get install clamav

Update the virus database. This should be done on a regular interval to detect new types of malware.

freshclam

Install ClamFS

ClamAV is an antivirus engine, however it can't do real-time scans by itself. We will use ClamFS for these types of scans.

apt-get install clamfs clamav-daemon

Setup ClamFS

Run these commands to configure ClamFS.

mkdir /clamfs /clamfs/secure

chmod 777 /clamfs /clamfs/secure

gunzip -c /usr/share/doc/clamfs/clamfs-sample.xml.gz > /clamfs/config.xml

nano /clamfs/config.xml

In config.xml, replace:

<filesystem root="/tmp" mountpoint="/clamfs/tmp" public="yes" />

with:

<filesystem root="/your/target/dir" mountpoint="/clamfs/secure" public="yes" />

Start ClamFS

Run the ClamFS process.

clamfs /clamfs/config.xml

While it's running, every file that goes to /clamfs/secure will scanned by ClamAV. If a file is detected as "clean", it will moved to its target directory.

For example, you can protect the Downloads folder by updating the configuration file again. In config.xml, replace:

<filesystem root="/tmp" mountpoint="/clamfs/tmp" public="yes" />

with:

<filesystem root="/home/username/Downloads" mountpoint="/clamfs/secure" public="yes" />

Then, in your browser, change the download folder to: /clamfs/secure.

Congratulations, you have completed installing ClamAV and ClamFS on your server.