[GLLUG] Email problems

[Chris Bell]

Hello,
I have had a pair of boxes running Debian for a long time, a RaspberryPi 
running Stretch in my DMZ as mail gateway, and an old P3 still running Jessie 
in my protected network as mail server. Both were running exim4-heavy, 
spamassassin, and clamav, while the gateway was configured to run sa-exim.
I had to power everything down while my electricity meter was replaced, and 
both appeared to fail on restart. I already had RaspberryPi replacements ready 
but untested, running Debian Stretch, so I crashed over to them.
Both gave repeated error messages, and both were sending temporary rejections, 
so I checked the configuration details, which were all as used before. A 
persistent error message involved no access from clamav to a file within
/var/run/clamav, so on both boxes I ran
dpkg-reconfigure clamav-daemon
which tied itself into an endless loop of configuration entry requests, and I 
had to crash out. I then checked /etc/clamav/clamd.conf which appeared to have 
reasonable defaults.
The files that apparently gave access problems were not present, so I created 
them, set the owner, and permissions 666 as listed in /etc/clamav/clamd.conf, 
then re-booted to find the error messages re-appearing. The files had been 
removed. Clamav still had write access to /var/run/clamav, but did not stop 
complaining until I re-created the files.
I am now receiving emails as normal.
Has anyone else had similar problems?
-- 
Chris Bell
Website http://chrisbell.org.uk