How to use ClamAV in Cpanel Accounts

In our ongoing commitment in providing the best web hosting services for our clients we have installed ClamAV on our server. This allows any of our hosted clients to scan their home directory and their email for viruses (virii) from within their Hosting Account Cpanel. what follows is a tutorial on how to use the ClamAV scanning engine.

What is ClamAV?

Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. and can be had by visiting ClamAV.net

Can I use ClamAV on my local computer?

 No, ClamAV is for servers and hosting accounts you would still need to use a anti-virus program for your local computer. ClamAV scans your hosting account, email files, web space and ftp areas on the Geek On Wheels server.

How do I scan my Cpanel hosting account using ClamAV?

First you will need to login to your Cpanel which can be accessed by going to http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel and when prompted enter your Cpanel/FTP UserID and password. This information should have been provided to you when you signed up for hosting and if you don't know it or don't have it can be obtained by calling the Geek On Wheels office and providing proof as to who you are.

Once logged into your Cpanel account you will see a bunch of icons on the home page the Clam AV icon is located at the very bottom of the main Cpanel Interface


To Start the virus scanning process simply click the ClamAV Icon

Once you have activated the ClamAV Interface you will be presented with some choices.

• Scan Entire Home Dirrectory
• Scan Mail
• Scan Public FTP Space
• Scan Public WebSpace

We recommend that you Scan Entire Home Directory at least once a month and Scan mail once a week.
make your selection and click the "Scan Now" button.

Scanning of your Entire home directory can take several minutes if you have a lot of files or a lot of email on the server or both so please be patient and let the virus scan complete.

ClamAV will show you a list of infected files (if any) as it scans your directory and email

Once the scan is complete ClamAV will notify you with a prompt that the scan is finished and if any files were infected.

Click the OK button to continue to the ClamAV process cleanup interface.

If you had email or other files that were infected with viruses ClamAV will present you with this screen and here you need to make some choices.

ClamAV can only disinfect mailboxes and if the viruses were in emails then select the disinfect option for each email. Selecting Quarantine or Destroy will either quarantine your whole inbox or destroy your whole inbox and IS NOT RECOMMENDED!!! Also selecting Ignore is not recommended as leaving virus infected email on the server will only serve to infect you or other users. Disinfect is your only option for virus infected email!

If you had other files such as zip files, pdf's, jpgs, or anything NOT an email then you will not have an option to disinfect. You should select Quarantine or Destroy.

The only time you should select Ignore is if ClamAV shows you zip files as being Oversized.Zips and you KNOW the file is yours, you uploaded and that it is clean. ClamAV will incorrectly report over sized zips that exceed the MaxCompressionArchive limit and is something they are working on to overcome these "false positives".

In either case once you have made your selection simply click the "Process Cleanup" button

Once ClamAV has processed the files that were infected it will generate a report of its actions and the files that were infected


Thats it! you have successfully scanned your Geek On Wheels hosting account and email and can breathe a little easier knowing your web site and email are protected from potentially harmful files.

Remember to scan you account at least once a week for email and once a month to scan everything on your account because in the end YOU are ultimately responsible for the files and email that reside on our server!!!