freshclam: "Problem with internal logger"

I had a happily running server with clam-av-0.88 (Clam Antivirus version 0.88). Suddenly, I started getting cron messages, regarding "freshclam-sleep" spitting out an error message "ERROR: problem with internal logger".

After a bit of searching, our first hit was that there was a permission issue. However, that was not the case for me.

The solution finally was that I had to restart the freshclam daemon. From the commmand :

ps aux | grep clam

I realised that there was a stray freshclam-sleep process runing. The oputput looked like this :

qscand    2056  0.0  0.9  81384 38820 ?        Ss    2006  20:13 /usr/sbin/clamd
qscand    2064  0.0  0.0   2548  1072 ?        Ss    2006   0:01 /usr/bin/freshclam -d -p /var/run/clamav/freshclam.pid
root      1454  0.0  0.0   2260   936 ?        Ss   Mar28   0:00 /bin/bash /usr/share/clamav/freshclam-sleep
qscand   12425  0.0  0.0   2544  1004 ?        S    Mar28   0:00 /usr/bin/freshclam --quiet
root     17913  0.0  0.0   3860   668 pts/0    S+   05:30   0:00 grep clam

I just killed all the freshclam processes, deleted the lock file for freshclam and started the daemon with

/sbin/service freshclam start

and voila everything started working like a champ!!!

That was pretty much it....
Hope that helps.