Well I've decided to go with mybb as my forum software. Its accessable at http://forum.sandmines.org as well as a link on http://www.sandmines.org.

 No posts yet, but users can register.

 I've decided to migrate my server from netbsd to ubuntu (just to make things easier). sandmines.org is running on a hp dl350 g5 server with 2 cpus, each with 4 cores and 14gb of ecc ram. I'm using raid 5 for the 3 disks I have in it. outgoing mail has been set up (forwarded through gmail), as has the standard LAMP setup. This is a minimal website at this time, and I'm not allowing comments in my drupal blog posts. (Next I will install some sort of forum, which will be log-in-able to users).