Good writeup
Nice one, I'm on the verge of upgrading my mail server (custom qmail variant on OpenBSD) and it's good to see a decent writeup that clarifies one of the possible options because a technical manual is rarely informative about the true nature of the beast. That said, I will admit I might end up being horribly boring and stick with the one I know, partly because it's got "tinker with this" written all over it...
For system specs, noting that my email traffic volume is very low and the now vastly oversized replacement HDDs needed add-on PCI-IDE cards because the motherboards were too old to handle a disk bigger than a 1.44 floppy: current mail server is on a Pentium 233 with 96MB of memory and I think it used some swap when I had a shared printer temporarily attached to it for the faxes (these more useful than people might think) ; the soon-to-be-new mail server is a huge upgrade, being a VIA 400Mhz with 284MB of memory which is seems like overkill.
The current one is reliable but I had to make a custom CD to boot because the BIOS didn't like the setup and the new one seems to have a MAC address randomiser or an imminent nasty hardware fault (probably should RTFM) and I suppose the lesson here is that 'cheapest' (or re-used) is not always the same as 'appropriate minimalism'. Also, a new 20-times-spec box uses a quarter of the power but buying a new one kill half the fun of it...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
