Shut my mouth ... the comments in aolserver-errors.pl include the following:
# 1/15/2000 -- replaced all calls to 'tail` with seek() calls
# to improve portability. This also allows us to compile this script
# with perlcc to create a single binary that should work under
# a chroot'ed server.
And yea, verily, it works just fine. So that's one problem solved.
