New Servers - Mail, Perl - MySQL - PHP and things.

[Grant Peel]

Hi all,

As mentioned in a couple of posts, I am about to deploy two new servers, and
have some time to ask a few questions :-)

So far, I have FreeBSD 4.10 installed and running nicely. It is virgin, not
been touched ... yet.

1. Should I upgrade the perl version. FBSD comes with 5.005_03. I think the
latest Perl distro was 5.8.
    If yes, do I install directly from ports?
        If yes, how do I ensure the old version is being ignored. I gues
what I am really asking, is what is
        the correct upgrade procedure?

I want to be able to keep THIS (FBSD) installation 'upgradeable'. I have
done some things to my other systems (FBSD 4.9 and 4.4) that I have been
told would break if I upgraded the OS.

2. What are the key items to adhear to when installing FBSD and other
software so that the OS remains upgradeable?

In the past, I have always used suEXec with Apache. Lately, I have been
considering that it may be more pain than its worth.

3. Thoughts on the above please.

For mail, I am currently using Exim (4.22) along with vm-pop3d, and
Spamassassin. I implimented this combination so I could have truely virtual
POP3 mbox's. I find little support for vm-pop3d, and I find Exim is alot of
work to impliment (Routers, Transports etc).

4. Does anyne know of a better, still secure, simple method of managing
virtual pop accounts that can still handle all the details? (Majordomo,
Spamassassin etc).

5. What are the latest releases of Apache, Perl PHP Mysql that seem to play
nice for everyone.

I have installing software only to find that one relase of one thing does
not work with another release of another!

TIA !

-Grant