Oh the pain!

So Debian Etch needs another kernel image upgrade, which I dutifully performed and rebooted the system and mpt-status stopped working!  I only noticed the problem when I got a warning alert SMS from Nagios, upon further investigation (using mpt-status autoload) I got this error message:-
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I have quite a few Windows boxes that need monitoring from Nagios and mostly everything is pretty straightforward.  I used to use the old nsclient utility until I started to need to run custom scripts on my machines at which point I shifted to nc_net which is a lot more advanced and currently under active development (always a healthy thing for an open-source project).

The other day I rebooted one of my Windows machines to find that nc_net would not start up correctly.  I kept getting the the following error in the good old event viewer:-
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Further to my post about DSPAM Suexec problems I also ran into a further problem recently with our DSPAM server……

We get A LOT of mail through this system and when I say a lot I mean s***loads, the last count was 51 million emails processed in 9 months!!!!  Anyway, DSPAM uses a set of perl cgi scripts to generate the  web interface which while it works, certainly isn’t cut out for performance.  These cgi scripts use the system.log to build its history and quarantine views and if you still want to be able to use the web interface then you will have to start pruning the system.log file on a regular basis.
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After much testing and general messing about, I have found that the mplayer-plugin for firefox works much better than the realplayer plugin (IMHO). It not only streams typical realmedia but also streams quicktime, windows media (wmv etc) and pretty much every other type of media out there. Also, you do not need the linux binary emulation to get this working.
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So I thought upgrading Apache for a DSPAM anti-spam/anti-virus machine was going to be straightforward!?!?

What was I thinking? OK, so FreeBSD’s ports system is great and generally handles upgrades effortlessly, but I had forgotten what was required for DSPAM and in particular the SUEXEC module.
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