I have a production server with a specific LAMP setup.

I want to create a normal user account on the same server, also offering LAMP services, but with a slightly different setup, primarily a specially compiled PHP.

I think this is fairly feasible, but then I got to thinking why not have a special Apache and MySQL for the new user as well? But then I got to thinking that this - especially the apache - could be more trouble than it's worth, because they're daemons, and would clash with the server main LAMP installation. LAso the bind server, which I am also running may give me problems.

Does anybody know how hard that is to do? It may be a normal task for a sysadmin .. is it? I'm not sure.

Doing this is perfectly feasable, I have done this before in a chroot environment.

Your only probelm will be that:

1. Unless you have more than one IP, you will need to change the port for Apache, MySQL, etc
2. To listen to ports less than 1024, the damons need to be started by root and not by a normal user

thanks saman007uk,

I don't think I want to go chroot way .. it become too much of a virtual machine then.

Yes, only one ip, hmm the ports thing sounds complicated ... I may want to forgo that. I think I'll just stick to a special PHP which gets prioirty over the other PHPs that are installed via $PATH setting.