We ran 1200+ accounts on a 486-80 with 32MB and 1GB of disk on an ISA-bus
SCSI controller; in fact, the machine is still in service. It also was
the shell host for all of our ISP customers. The OS is BSDI 2.0.1. It's
never crashed since August of 1995, and other than low disk space I'd bet
it would be good for another few years if the present owner chose to keep
using it.
If I were doing it today, I'd use a P-II at 350MHz or so, and use a good
SCSI controller that will provide hardware RAID1 or RAID5. 128MB should
be plenty of RAM if you don't run X. I don't know how much disk you'll
need; that will depend on your users and their habits. I'd think 10 or
20GB would be a good place to start, and would probably last you a long
time. RedHat is easy to install and well supported, as are a couple of
other distributions, but none are really ready to go right out of the box,
you'll need to do some tweaking with any of them.
As for software, I use Sendmail and Qpopper. I have heard very good things
about Qmail, but have never used it. You can also use one of several free
web-based mail packages to provide that capability to your users; they
usually require imap, PHP and SQL. I was working on a couple of them, but
I don't really need to provide Web email, so I dropped the project months
ago.
Dale
---
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
-- Isaac Asimov
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