As mentioned I'm happy to help out on a SysAdmin perspective.
As we discussed I'll be able to help - but quite busy - up till about May but can then devote more time to assisting with whatever solution is chosen.
Given the recent chat that Drupal appears to run fine under what will be CentOS 5.6 with the php53 package I'd give +1 to this so that we can keep as much as possible required for this within the CentOS repositories rather than relying on third party ones.
James