Hi Walter,
I haven't tried the full oacs set up, but was able to compile aolserver 4 from sources and run in the background (no -f or -i) without any problems. It writes to the error log just fine. I guess you've got the file permissions correct, or you wouldn't see anything, gibberish or otherwise, in your error log. That would have been my first suggestion.
The only difficultly I have run into is with /etc/ttys. The docs say that it should work more or less like /etc/inittab on other Unices, but I wasn't able to get it to work. Daemontools here I come...
