Self-hosting: dashboard & RSS feed problems

We use WP-recommended host BlueHost for many of our sites and we also self-host many domains on our own Apache server running PHP 5.2.10 and MYSQL 5.1.37.

Our sites run mostly OK on our server but there are a few lingering
anomalies:

1. We can’t upgrade WP through the dashboard and must use FTP.
2. We can’t upgrade/add plugins through the dashboard and must use FTP.
3. We can’t add themes through the dashboard and must use FTP.
4. Instances of using the RSS feed widget in themes generate error log messages like:
   

   [06-Sep-2009 05:27:41] PHP Notice: A feed could not be found at
   http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=phoenix&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt in /home/httpd/domain/DOMAINNAME/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php on line 1680

   In this error message, I’ve replaced the actual domain name
   with the generic “DOMAINNAME”.

We suspect that owners, groups and permissions are an issue and that once we can get these ironed out, we’ll be OK.

Apache runs as user nobody, group nobody.

The domain directories are set with user fred and group nobody.

When we TOTALLY open the files to 777, it still doesn’t work. Changing the owner to nobody, everything works.

The perms are generally set to 664 for files and 775 for directories.

It seems, but I am not sure, that WP expects the files to be OWNED by the same user as Apache runs under, not just to have write perms. Meaning that if the files are owned by user fred but Apache runs as user nobody, even though perms allow creating and updating files, it won’t do so.

Another factor is an extra level of security where we have added an .htaccess-based extra login and password before permitting access to any page with “wp-admin” in the URL to thwart script-kiddies trying to brute-force their way in.

We still love BlueHost for the many accounts we host there but we have a need to do some self-hosting. Any assistance to help us get our server configuration correct so the WP dashboards and RSS feeds work as nicely as they do on BH would be appreciated.