Wayne,
If you're interested in going the *NIX you should take a look at the setup at
http://slashdot.org. They've got some serious iron (quad Xeon, dedicated load balancer, etc) but I don't think you'll have to deal with the same loads they do. I think they're using *BSD, Linux, MySQL, and their own front end (free, but would require some hacking to be a BBS of this type). Anyway the software's all free. Your time, however, isn't.
blue
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blue
'81 SC Targa