This was one of the only tutorials on this subject that actually got everything spot on. Have used this several times on many different servers (all same Debian OS) and has worked every time!

Just a quick note to users who may use suExec with Apache2 and have encountered the ‘Attempt to invoke directory as script’ or ‘suexec policy violation’ errors in their apache error logs. This problem stems from a slight misconfiguration somewhere along the line. This is usually due to suExec trying to use the wrong user to access the cgi-bin directory (/usr/lib/cgi-bin). You need to make sure your Virtual Host is not set to use the root user ( uid:0, gid: 0 ) to execute cgi scripts as this, by default, is not allowed. This problem also presents itself as a ’500 Internal Server Error’ when trying to visit ‘domain.tld/awstats/awstats.pl’.