I managed to take down my server, wipe it out and install Gentoo (previously redhat).

It's faster now. I also managed to do away with the likes of dynu.com and other services that offer dynamic dns (not downing their service but it's always great when you can do it yourself and not need to outsource). My server has a static ip and a domain name (gigahurts.net and gigahurts.org) . I created a domain for my house "home.gigahurts.net" and i wrote a shell script that runs every 5 minutes that sends an nsupdate message to my DNS server and updates my ip to match the domain name. So i have essentially created a dynamic dns service like dynu.com. Email works like a charm with imap and horde-imp with some other plugins using a mysql back-end, web server upgraded to apache2 with ssl and php working.

all i have to do is redo the content which i have tar balled on my home machine but im really thinkign of just starting from scratch. if u visit the site now it will just show the local time (EST).

http://www.gigahurts.net if u want to see the current time where the server is
http://www.gigahurts.net/images/beyonce-desktop.png one of my desktops (home.gigahurts.net)