I was re-doing one of my lab monitoring tools, a VM that hosted too many sparse and poorly maintained pieces of software. Now re-homing each bit onto its own VM (partially for sanity) - I ended up re-installing the excellent NFSen (a netflow monitoring tool/frontend for nfdump).

The software includes a directory named ‘icons’ in the web root, which doesn’t seem insane to me. What is insane, however, is Apache’s decision (by default!) to include an alias for a folder named ‘icons’ in the root. That means that without knowing it, the NFSen icons folder was being redirected to /usr/share/apache2/…/ whatever. That caused a headache.

To find this out, I ran:
cd /etc/apache2<br /> grep -iR /usr/share *

This told me about the dang alias file, /etc/apache2/mods-available/alias.conf

I went into that file, commented out this dumb default, reset apache and now it’s away laughing.