I have always used a control panel on my dedicated servers - from cPanel to Plesk to Virtualmin, and I am now considering ditching a CP altogether and manually editing config files.

My requirements are fairly simple, I will host multiple sites on the server; some Apache with PHP & Mysql and some Passenger with Rails & Postgres. All will require email smtp/pop. FTP/Stats will not be required.

Could someone please give me a quick run-down of what I would need to do - in terms of installing software and configuration? My server will come with a base install of CentOS 6.4 minimal.

My thoughts so far:

• Install/update latest versions of MySQL & Postgres (are they 'safe' out of the box? Or do I need to do anything else like set up root passwords etc?)
• Install Apache & PHP (again, are the base installs good to go or do they require security tweaks?)
• Set up nameservers/hostnames/reverse DNS etc (Any guides on how to do this please?)
• Install Rubygems
• Install and configure Dovecot and Postfix (any tips on doing this? Or links to how-tos that cover it please?)
• Set up each website - any links to guides on how to do this?
• Install/configure firewall (or is the default install good to go?)

Any other tips or advice would be greatly appreciated, as would links to guides or how-tos.