Glad you got it to work
I've fixed the server to use a local copy of the image.
Are you using the Apache reverse proxy for finer grained authentication?
On your server troubles, these all or nothing upgrades were the primary reason I switched from binary to source linux distros on all my computers (including the servers).
For example, with gentoo you have this nifty feature called slots which allow you to have two (or more) major versions of software installed side by side. So for example you could have PHP 5.2 and 5.3 installed side by side. And you can do more frequent (but less intensive) upgrades.