Hey Dan,
I pore over readme and fora before tying to figure out local architecture issues. You gotta' know what works for your situation, n'est ce pas?
I've pointed Support to all the usual references but that's not as important as the mojo they bring to the landscape. I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut, yo.
Don't you just hate it when you read responses in fora that start out with "Just..." or worse yet "What works for me... < snip > ... but I'm using a different version than you"
What works
for me is to hear from people eating the grass in the same corral as me. Yeah, I heard about the greener grass on a dedicated box. If I hear one more time that I need to get out of the kiddie pool and just buy a box (with my imaginary money) I'm going to go on an astronaut-style-loaded-gun-n-diaper-hold-my-BigGulp road trip.
Here are a few links that may/not bring joy:
Installing WordPress MU on a CPanel/WHM Server - Blogopreneur.com
Ignore Some Subdomains With WPMu « WordPress Codex
Ma.tt » Wildcard DNS and Sub Domains
Post what you have for the next schmuck who needs this.
Again, good for scoping the work. Useless without local knowledge.
Surpass actually got the install working for a while there so there is hope with the current server patch levels. An impending upgrade to PHP5 in 8 days time will be par for the course. A move to Apache2+cPanel is rumored to bork the httpd.conf edits with periodic overwrites. Psshh! That's later. Hell, I may drown on my next kayaking trip/eaten by gators/banjo players and all of this will have been for naught.