Till has come up with a method for keeping track of the things needed to correctly build out a server, a checklist package written in PHP.
For a couple weeks now we kept on saying that we need a checklist of what we need on a server in order to make the site run - now since we setup the neato bonito cluster last week the checklist all of the sudden had a higher priority and I took an hour or so to create that last night.
The code loops through the loaded extensions (get_loaded_extensions) and runs a shell_exec on a directory to see if the requirements are met.