Ok here goes, cause i guess i am going to be one of those that will struggle. 
i downloaded and installed NEAT4.9 because at 1st glance it looked like it 
would make administration easier. i can pull up the web interface and edit 
the host.cfg, which BTW i couldnt do by using the httpd default group and 
chmod g+w host.cfg as suggested in the README.txt for NEAT. the problem now 
is when i try to verify and restart netsaint using the NEAT web interface i 
get this error msg: 

ERROR - userid apacheuser (this is not the real default httpd user) cannot run 
/usr/local/netsaint/bin/netsaint to verify your config. This is probably your 
httpd userid. Fix this

i am not sure why it is using this apache user, it is not entered in the 
netsaint.cfg file. any ideas?

slr