Building a virgin.

[Grant Peel]

Hi all,

As some of you know I have been expierncing random freezing of a PE 1850. 
Since there is no real answer (lots of opinions), I have decided to build a 
new server for my client.

I have a PE 750 that has been running a year now as a devel server. All that 
was needed was to upgrade the HD to 74GB per the original quote. That was 
done this weekend.

FreeBSD 5.4 has been installed and the ports collection CVSUpded this 
morning. The kernel has been rebuilt to allow QUOTAs, and a basic ipfw 
firewall setup.

I have loaded a number of servers in the past, with success, all of them 
based around PHP APache, MySQL Exim and vm-pop3d.

All that having been said, I wanted to pick some brains of y'all regarding 
how you would handle loading all the new software on the server.

The goal here is to have a functional webserver, with Apache, MySQL, 
PHP(with bells and whistles) , PERL, vm-pop3d, Exim(MTA), Spamassassin, 
Webmin, Usermin, ipa (for bandwidth accounting), Webalizer

It will be used my my client to lots of virtual hosting. However, I am the 
only one with shell access.

Here is what I intend to do ... suggestions, criticisms welcome. (i.e. doing 
something backwards, missing some critical steps etc). The first few lines 
are the ones I ussually trip over ... geting PHP and apache to work right 
together, and getting the correct PHP extensions istalled. Also, I like 
using Apache 2.x so I can have one deamon with http and https in one deamon.

If anyone has a slicker flow of installation, I would really like to hear 
about it!

installing database/MySQL server (4.1.18_1)
installing database/MySQL client (4.1.18)

install lang/PHP4 (4.4.1_1)
install (use config) lang/php-extensions

install apache

install Exim

install vm-pop3d

install p5-spamassassin

install webalizer

install and customize Webmin

install and costomize usermin

install and configure various scripts for backups, log rotation, mrtg 
(system load) etc etc.

-Grant