How to avoid emails from Dr. Web

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Dr. Web is a Russian anti-virus utility that comes bundled with Plesk. It’s good and it tries to keep the bad guys out.

To keep up with all the mutations out there it tries to update itself frequently. B default, Plesk sends the system admin an email when this happens – no matter if Dr. Web was successful or if there was a problem.

This is what a sample email looks like:

/etc/cron.daily/drweb-update:

Dr.Web update details:
Update server: http://update.us1.drweb.com/plesk/700/unix
Update has begun at Thu May 17 03:37:07 2011
Update has finished at Thu May 17 03:38:16 2011

Following files have been updated:
	/var/drweb/bases/drwdaily.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/drwtoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/dwmtoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/dwntoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/dwrtoday.vdb
	/var/drweb/bases/timestamp
	/var/drweb/updates/timestamp

Multiply that email by the number of servers you’re looking after, and you’ll soon have an overflowing inbox.

Here’s the solution: tweak a system file and divert those emails to nowhere.

Have a look at either /etc/cron.daily/drweb-update or if that file doesn’t exist on your system, take a look at /etc/cron.d/drweb-update.

The content of this file should only be one line which calls the actual update routine in crontab format:

*/30 * * * * drweb /opt/drweb/update.pl

Now use your favourite text editor and amend it to this:

*/30 * * * * drweb /opt/drweb/update.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

What this does is to direct the output of the script to null rather than an email (null being a “nothing device” in Linux, hence the text simply disappears).

Case closed. No need to reboot your server either.
Special thanks to Igor and igraf on this Parallels Forum Thread.



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3 thoughts on “How to avoid emails from Dr. Web”

  1. In later versions of Plesk, the file /etc/cron.daily/drweb-update is not a single line anymore, it’s grown into a few. This trick still works though, as the line that calls the update script (/opt/drweb/update.pl) is still included. Amend this line with the /dev/null trick shown above and emails will be silenced.

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