by Lee Coursey.
Thank you Ken and others for your help. I'm giving up on this endeavour for now and reverting back to an older version that my shared hosting platform can manage (2.2.x)
I've complained to dreamhost about the version problem with mysql, but they haven't responded. I shouldn't have to be hosting this anyway, but my wife's school district is too scared to have LINUX machine on site...
Thanks again to all of oyu.