I use djbdns / tinydns. So really, I don't have to do any of that. What you really would do, given your list above, would be - Buy hardware from vendor, ship

I use djbdns / tinydns. So really, I don't have to do any of that. What you really would do, given your list above, would be - Buy hardware from vendor, ship direct to colo. - When racked, they hook up a KVM/IP device that has virtual media support to the system. - You install your OS from your desktop machine. - Turn off all services except DNS and public key SSH with hosts.deny and hosts.allow setup appropriately - Use automated scripts to move zones from current setup to djbdns format . - Tweak Makefile for djbdns (included in the distribution) to use ssh to move both the datafile and a text-version backup of the file, to each system. You can keep your original files on a machine local to you and push the changes via SSH that way. - you should have a machine or two outside your facility to run e.g. smokeping or other measurement/monitoring tools anyways; so run smokeping etc. on the same machine and if you are paranoid, run the webserver on 127.0.0.1 and use SSH tunneling to view the pages. Usually for $100/month per server, you can get outage monitoring and 30 minutes of remote hands per month, included.