FreeBSD is sweet, we've been using it for years now on our production networking servers (smtp, mail, dns, dhcp, nagios, apache, and OpenBSD's PF firewall) and it's rock solid and easy to maintain, FreeBSD's ports system is absolute wonders, being able to easily choose which components you need from nice text menu and then automagically resolve all dependencies with "make config && make install" is simply great. OpenSolaris is also running on our production servers, but in storage domain, ZFS and COMSTAR is a wet dream for storage admins (see here: http://blog.laspina.ca/ubiquitous/multi_protocol_storage_provisioning_with what you can do with it), and now de-duplication in ZFS is out, absolutely amazing..

Interesting article, Cyrus is very robust piece of software indeed (gratz also to Fastmail.fm for that), I'm just curious, which OS Fastmail.fm servers are running on ?

I'm shipping HP P400 SmartArray controller back, it's a nice controller, but it only knows how to do RAID, not JBOD, and while HP DL185 is a nice machine for a storage server (12 3.5 SATA drives in 2U only), I'm no way putting windows inside it to serve several terabytes datastore, OpenSolaris with ZFS and COMSTAR on the other hand - yes, just have to replace that nice shiny P400 controller first, to get access to disks and make ZFS magic to work..

Project Honey Pot has a good tutorial on how to avoid spambots: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/how_to_avoid_spambo ts.php