error while scanning-permission denied

Avast Business Avast Business for Linux
1

Hello!

I just installed the latest version of avast for linux on Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Everything went okay; I even got it to do a thorough scan. It took forever to scan, and when it finished, it gave me this message for the root directory: error while scanning-permission denied. as long as it took, surely it must have scanned the root, but why won’t it show me what it found? (Incidentally, when I checked permissions under “user’s and groups”, root has no privileges and isn’t a member of the “root” group. Yet if I administer my system, it always asks for my password; is this just a quirk of Ubuntu?)
I tried adding myself to the anitvirus group, but that didn’t seem to help; it still won’t scan root. If I do a quick scan, I get this message: error while scanning-file was not tested to to configuration details. Where and how do I configure this, if not in the gui menus?
What can I do to scan the root directory? I know there aren’t that many viruses for Linux, but after years of fighting with Windoze, it’s hard to just breeze through without some protection on my machine. And I don’t want to find one of the rare ones on my system; while I know better than to download weird files and open attachments, others use my machine occasionally, and they aren’t so cautious.
Any help anyone can give me is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

sincerely,

linuxlady

2

Hallo,
what’s important here is Your user id (uid) and the rights on the filesystem.
Open a terminal windows, and type “id”. Then try to do “find path_that_you_wanted_to_scan”, and check, whether it’s accessible or not.
For users with uid=0 the rights have no sense - they can access everything.

Btw. the message was probably dedicated to some sub-directory of root (/), probably the directory “/root”, which is not accessible for common users - such directories are skipped during scan, and reported at the end in the final summary.

regards,
PC

3

:wink: the easiest way is to open a console as root (su) and launch

avast -a -c -t=A -r=<logfile.log> /root