I finally got it working. It came down to some permissions. I may have opened myself up to attacks from the hax0r world but I don't care - I got a blogger blog working!
Once I get PHP and Perl working I can get Movabletype going and start serving up some blogs and dump dixiesys where mennoboy currently is hosted. 20GB of storage sounds a lot better than 200MB, doncha think?
Somehow in getting SSH to work, I've broken HTTP. Grrrr. Logically it's something I did but I've retraced my steps and as far as I know the only thing I've changed is the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files - which if I put them back to the way they were (as Carlos was helpful enough to do yesterday), locks me out of SSH again.
I'm sure this is all very enlightening to the non-tech geeks out there. But you'll just have to suffer through it or go read another blog. :) It's a challenge that has been laid in front of me by Linux and I can't give in and admit defeat.
I got SSH working! After frustrating over it for a couple of hours last night I finally tracked it down to the hosts.allow file only allowing local calls to 'SSH'. Once I fixed that, everything works fine. Now if only I could get webmin to start working I'd be set.
I know.. pathetic. But I have to win the office pool.