I just spent the past few hours on the phone with Smirk, acting as backup as he finally got “Project White Elephant” back up and running [1], with the control panels, MySQL replication [2], automatic backups and failover switching. P had left notes, but they lacked some crutial details that took P about a week to discover (the information was there in some configuration files, but getting the MySQL replication working with Blech (the control panel) was the major sticking point.
So it's back up and running, which is a load off our minds.
[2] http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/managing-mysql-replication.html