If only I was. I'm an experienced developer and unix sysadmin and it still took two full-time days to get a working production-grade rails system installed on top of ubuntu.

I'm no rails guru, but I still thought that was an incredible amount of time to be spending installing and configuring things.

Well, what can I say. I was in the exact same situation about a year ago and it took me about 4 hours to set up a whole new Ubuntu server with Rails, nginx, Mongrel, MySQL, deployment via capistrano, Subversion, etc. That was the first time, nowadays I can install that stack in about 2 hours tops (manually).

Methinks you should upgrade your tool kit if it took you two days to do this.