Christ, what a clustergoat.
A friend of mine who wants to add a Slash site to his list of sites asked me if I would add it to the server we use. FreeBSD has just added slash to its ports system, so I was willing to give it a go.
Well, the FreeBSD ports system builds Apache to use DSOs so that more modules can be added on the fly, including mod_perl.
To make a long horrible story short, apache13 + mod_ssl + mod_perl began acting weird. I build a special static version of these, but then it got even weirder. It wouldn't start up successfully at system start. There was some kind of race condition going on. If I stopped and started the server immediatly, it wouldn't restart, but if I waited a while, it would start. Couldn't figure out w t f was happening.
So I gave up. I built apache2 within the ports directory for most of the sites, and a special apache13+mod_perl for other stuff. I'll wait for mod_perl2 to figure out how to integrate it all.
I like FreeBSD a lot, and the ports system has made my life very convenient, but in this instance, it has been very aggravating.
