Gentoo Linux Documentation -- Upgrading Apache (have you done it?)

Gentoo Linux Documentation -- Upgrading Apache:
then Upgrading PHP
and making the server serves both PHP4 and PHP5

GCC upgrade guide

Hercules Load Balancer Virtual ApplianceVMTN Virtual Appliances Directory

Hercules Load Balancer Virtual ApplianceVMTN

Hercules Load Balancer Virtual Appliance

Hercules is a tiny but mighty load balancer appliance. It can be used to balance requests using any of these TCP protocols:

• HTTP
• HTTPS
• SMTP
• FTP
• POP3
• LDAP

It runs on a linux os built from scratch to have a minimal
footprint. It can run with just 32MB memory for normal usage and you can increase memory requirements for the appliance as you need. It also has a built in web server, ssh server, dhcp client. You can administer the machine remotely via ssh. It is setup for dhcp so the networking is setup automatically. A webserver is installed to both serve up this page and to help you test different configurations. The load balancing functionality is provided by the excellent open source project pen.

[Note: VERY simple!!! - pizzaman]

Pound and Pen - Simple Load Balancing

Pound and Pen - Simple Load Balancing: "Pound and Pen are simple web server load balancers licensed under the GPL that run mainly on Unix based operating systems. Pound is a web (port 80) load balancer only, unlike Pen which is designed to balance any simple TCP/IP protocol, including http, smtp, ftp, and others. Before you decide to load balance your website with one of these software programs there are several other considerations you may want to understand."
...
Pen Load Balancer - http://siag.nu/pen/
Pound Load Balancer - http://www.apsis.ch/pound/
...

Extracting remote_ip is easily done with mod_extract_forwarded
Pound mailing list has this information.
Or this one is good, with mod_rpaf.

Backup using SystemRescueCD & Partimage

Partimage Partition Image is a Linux/UNIX utility which saves partitions in many formats (see below) to an image file.

SystemRescueCd is a linux system on a bootable cdrom for repairing your system and your data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic ones (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It aims to be very easy to use: just boot from the cdrom, and you can do everything. The kernel of the system supports most important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), and network ones (samba and nfs).