Complete noob...

[George Goodman]

Thank you all for your very helpful comments and friendly assistance,
I am sure we will all be happy together :)

Just a bit of background -

I come from a windows background, currently hosting on w2k, apache2,
coldfusion, interbase/firebird...

I program and manage the sytems, network etc. so have general all
round knowledge. I have an engineering degree, so should be able to
learn new stuff.

Boss doesn't want to pay big bucks for upgrades and I have convinced
him to go to OpenBSD, php 5, mysql (must be ver 5, we need
transactions, stored proc etc.). The catch is that I must do it all if
I want it, so been burning midnight oil lately.

We have netscreen firewall devices so for now that side of things is
sorted, but I will be trying to duplicate all of the following on the
new systems:

Secure web site cluster (financial services so stakes are high) with
load balancing/redundancy for max uptime even during maintenance.

DB cluster (need redundancy as above) plus replication.

Stand alone mail server (from research would prefer Qmail over
Sendmail, but can I remove sendmail from OpenBSD easily?)

We only host manage our own stuff on our own servers, so there are no
outside users to worry about. I am sure that all of this must be
possible with OBSD, but if any of you see any problems, please let me
know so I can look elsewhere if I am on the wrong track here.
I have budget for new hardware, so legacy systems can operate while I
play with the new stuff.

I have not planned to set up X on the servers because I really don't
see the need, but if any of you can show me what the advantages would
be to do so I will.

Thanks again for all your help so far, and I will be working through
all the stuff you guys have sent me. I am sure I will be back with
more questions soon.

Best,

GG