First thing I am going to need for this process as a whole is a development environment. I am choosing Linux as the platform for the entire project and I will be using open source packages where ever I can, which would be most of them.
Many times I will be rewriting software and jumping through hoops that may not seem to be necessary, but the long term plan I have is to have a fully integrated system, which I do believe will require recreating the wheel (again) a few times.
I found a project called Linux from scratch that I am going to try to use for the base Linux systems that I need. My biggest problem with most Linux distributions has always been that they are over blown and take up more resources then they need to in order to accomplish the simple tasks that I want my servers for.
When I want a web server all I really need on it is Apache and a few extras to connect to the database server. When I want a database server I want MySql and not much more on the system, so the idea of Linux from scratch is exactly what I have been looking for for longer then I can imagine 
So I’m off to build my LFS development environment …