OK, so it takes some time – this is old hardware – but I’m happy to say that the new mail server, running Gentoo on SPARC, is running perfectly.Note: This post was originally part of my LinuxWorld blog; now migrated here after my resignation.It’s been up now for almost 72 hours, and I’ve been filtering spam for the last 48 hours with only about 8 making it through (out of 190), compared to the 20-30 that would make it through on the old system.The config is simple, Constable (Gentoo on SPARC) accepts all the email through postfix, then I use Amavisd-new in combination with SpamAssassin amd ClamAV to capture everything. This re-injects to postfix, which then forwards it on to the real mail server, Gendarme (Solaris 8 x86). On this box I use Sendmail in combination with Cyrus and use sieve to do some additional filtering, which gets rid of about another 20 emails that get through by ensuring they were actually sent to me, contain the right headers, and a few other simple tests.Setting up a spam filterering machine is nothing new of source, but it’s nice to see that with Gentoo everything is very easy. A couple of emerge commands to install the various bits and I’m up and running. Well, on this old machine after a significant wait of course; it took the best part of two days to compule and install the OS and then the required software. But what is easy is that the dependencies are sorted out for you. For example, installing amavisd-new required quite a few packages, and even installing something seemingly straightforward like NFS required a couple of packages I didn’t already have.In comparison to the pain you can gave even installing the pre-packaged RPMs this is a dream. With Gentoo, you also get the ability to be a bit more specific about some of the options.There are some complaints though; the current mysql packages (on SPARC) are not new enough to run with some of the latest, standard versions. I can’t connect to my MySQL server, which is running on a Windows Server 2003 box because the security support doesn’t match; it’s a problem I’ve experienced before, but with Gentoo I really don’t want to spol the ability to update to the latest versions by running ’emerge world’.For the moment though, I’m happy. I should spend about half an hour less sorting through the spam.