I don't know if I will hit upon the issue in this bug or not, but I'll offer what I've just found in case it may be useful:
I found freshclam to fail freshly installed with the error message indicated in this bug. Here is my freshclam.conf upon installation: ``` # Automatically created by the clamav-freshclam postinst # Comments will get lost when you reconfigure the clamav-freshclam package DatabaseOwner clamav UpdateLogFile /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log LogVerbose false LogSyslog false LogFacility LOG_LOCAL6 LogFileMaxSize 0 LogRotate true LogTime true Foreground false Debug false MaxAttempts 5 DatabaseDirectory /var/lib/clamav DNSDatabaseInfo current.cvd.clamav.net ConnectTimeout 30 ReceiveTimeout 30 TestDatabases yes ScriptedUpdates yes CompressLocalDatabase no SafeBrowsing false Bytecode true NotifyClamd /etc/clamav/clamd.conf # Check for new database 24 times a day Checks 24 DatabaseMirror db.local.clamav.net DatabaseMirror database.clamav.net ``` If you comment out the UpdateLogFile line, it'll run but be marked as a modified conffile. Didn't bother to check that this allows the (dead "success") systemd service to do more than just die with no error when run because no combination of debconf settings with ucf seemed to achieve the effect of commenting out that line. If I reconfigure it via debconf, it can be started. Upon reconfiguring, I have this config file: ``` # Automatically created by the clamav-freshclam postinst # Comments will get lost when you reconfigure the clamav-freshclam package DatabaseOwner clamav UpdateLogFile /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log LogVerbose false LogSyslog false LogFacility LOG_LOCAL6 LogFileMaxSize 0 LogRotate false LogTime true Foreground false Debug false MaxAttempts 5 DatabaseDirectory /var/lib/clamav DNSDatabaseInfo current.cvd.clamav.net ConnectTimeout 30 ReceiveTimeout 30 TestDatabases yes ScriptedUpdates yes CompressLocalDatabase no SafeBrowsing true Bytecode true NotifyClamd /etc/clamav/clamd.conf # Check for new database 24 times a day Checks 24 DatabaseMirror db.local.clamav.net DatabaseMirror database.clamav.net ``` Upon doing this I can now start the daemon via systemctl and it stays running. My changes were minimal, and it appears the one that matters was the log rotation setting. I'm not sure in this configuration if systemd or freshclam is responsible for logging. If the latter, logs won't get rotated. Before it'd rotate an empty logfile and die. Since it's no longer doing that, I assume systemd is responsible and will rotate logs however it is configured to do so. It's systemd, yay! Hope that sheds some light on the problem.
