First of all, the Promise Ultra133TX2 is a complete and utter piece of shit. It's not like I was trying to put it on a shitty motherboard devoid of RAM either, I tried it out on a SuperMicro 370DL3 with 1gb of registered PC133 SDRAM and a 1GHz Pentium III processor. Not a crappy computer by any stretch of the imagination, but attempting to connect a Seagate Barracuda 500gb drive to it resulted in nothing but missing interrupts and DMA buffer underruns. Honestly, Promise, a UDMA-133 controller that's less reliable with a half-terabyte drive than the shitty 7-year-old ServerWorks integrated IDE controller? The description "fuck sandwich" comes to mind.
Glitches caused by shitty-ass IDE controller cards aside, the new Mischa actually took next to no time at all. The biggest pain in the ass was getting SSL and various virtual hosts worked out, but everything's pretty much working now, and the fact I'm able to post this without running an INSERT through /usr/local/bin/mysql is proof.
Natrually, I stuck with OpenBSD so far as operating systems go. Mail, as with everything I set up is a MySQL + Dovecot (IMAP/POP3/SASL) + Postfix virtual setup that kills spam using amavisd-new, SpamAssasin and the SARE rules. I briefly debating ditching amavisd for MailScanner, but I remembered watching a single p3-866 with less than 300mb RAM (actually the old Mischa) running circles around a dual dual-core 2GHz Xeon and that pretty much ended there. For added good measure, from time to time I mess around with the FuzzyOCR and PDFInfo plugins.
A major difference between the new and old servers is I now use the Dovecot LDA in place of Postfix's default delivery mechanism and have finally been able to replace my cumbersome client-based filtering rules with server-side Sieve scripts. I would very much have liked to use Horde on this box, but IMP's IMAP performance was so abysmal (running on localhost, no less) that I would've been better off driving to Milton and copying my mail onto a jump drive. Well, it wasn't actually that bad, but there was a 5-9 second delay between clicking a link and the connection to the IMAP server, and since the only help I could find involved patching and rebuilding imap-uw (which I don't use), I grudgingly called it a bust.
As usually transpires, remote access to email is handled via SquirrelMail. To manage the server-side Sieve rules I installed the avelsieve plugin, filled in some blanks on it's File backend and the whole thing plays very nicely with Dovecot. It works well enough I even ripped all my message sorting rules out of Outlook and Thunderbird.
All-in-all I'm quite happy with the new box, now all I have to do is fight a couple small fires throughout the day, then I can go back to... umm.. whatever it is I do.
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