OK, let me clarify some things: coppermine is open source, as well as php, but this doesn't mean that we're experts in server setup. We (the coppermine dev team) are mostly hosted on paid webhosting, we do not run our own servers publicly. Turning to our forum to get help setting up your webserver in the first place is just not a bright idea, because there are better places on the internet that can help you setting it up. Arguing about this is like turning towards a car salesman, asking for support on mining - even though cars are built out of metal, with iron-ore being raised in mines, the car salesman certainly won't know much about it. I think you're missing the concept behind open-source spirit: just because we know some things doesn't necessarily mean that we
have to share this knowledge. I'm a network admin by profession, yet I chose to work on a project that deals with a web photo gallery. Although I know stuff about other things, I'm not supporting users who run into networking issues. It's up to us to decide what we're going to support. Being open source devs doesn't make us slaves of everyone on the internet, forcing us to help people on every aspect of life that we're familiar with. Excellent reading about this can be found
here.
Regarding our thought on self-hosting, the most important aspect is the amount of time you're ready to spend on maintaining a server. Imo, one person isn't enough to monitor a webserver publicly run on the internet. There have been discussions about this, the most recent one to be found
here. I wasn't going to insult you, and you'll note that I said that I said that self-hosting is not recommended for non-pros. As you're a pro, my remark didn't apply to you, so why bother?
Joachim
P.S. I have no idea what YUM is. Setting up Centos with a pre-made package with built-in mysql support is recommended, that's what I did on a test server some months ago.