Peter Kelly's questions

I am running spamassassin on Ubuntu 14.04 as root. When I am calling any of the methods, such as Check or ReportSpam, I am also passing in another user that the check should be run as. However I get a permissions issue

spamd: Can't locate Mail/SpamAssassin/PerMsgLearner.pm: Permission denied at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 644, line 7.

Looking at line 644 in that perl script it tries to import another perl file

require Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgLearner;

This is not an issue executing as root. The problem with executing the functions as root is that the bayes files (for learning over time about spam) get written to /nonexistent, a dir that doesn't exist (it is home dir for 'nobody' user).

So either as root or another user I cannot get SpamAssassin to write bayes file to disk so the learning functionality is broken.

In my application I am pinging a server and waiting for a response. I am using this to determine whether the server is available and responsive or not.

Is this a reliable way of determining availability? I assume a firewall could be filtering icmp traffic... Are there any other drawbacks? Is there a more reliable method?