Muliple Virtual Hosts on a Cloud Server

I have spent some time getting an inexpensive cloud server set up to host my hobby domains and have leapt enough hurdles to think I can document the process better than any single document I've found (but note that I've received lots of help from various open source project mailing lists, particularly from Mark Sapiro at Mailman-Users@python.org).  Follow me as I re-trace my steps.

The domains:

• mygnus.com (the "real" domain)
• usafa-1965.org (virtual: site for my college classmates)
• highlandsprings61.org (virtual: site for my high school classmates)

Domain registrar:

• 1 and 1 (http://1and1.com)

Cloud server hosting:

•  Rackspace Cloud (http://rackspacecloud.com)

The goals:

• use SSL/TLS encryption for all web access
• host multiple mailing lists for each virtual domain with one GNU Mailman instance
• use an RDBMS for Apache2 Digest authentication for access to user contact data (also on an RDBMS)
• I first used MySQL, but could not get the current Ubuntu Apache2 mod_dbd to work
• now I'm using the latest release of PostgreSQL (9.0.4), built from source, with which I am very satisfied

The cloud server:

• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (64-bit), 256 Gb RAM, 10 Gb disk space, single CPU

The primary software needing configuration (all from Ubuntu packages):

• Apache2 (http://httpd.apache.org)
• MySQL (http://www.mysql.org)
• Postfix (http://postfix.org)
• GNU Mailman (http://www.list.org)
• SQLite3 (http://sqlite.org)

Other resources required:

• PostgreSQL (http://postgresql.org)
• a single IP, wild card, multi-domain SSL/TLS certificate
• I got an inexpensive but effective one from: StartSSL (http://startssl.com)

To be continued...