It started out as a hardware man. I still am, in fact. It's just that of late I've been in 'retirement'. I late I've been a software man. Now I've found a project to get me back to my roots.
I was going through some old toms hardware page articles, when I came across this. I'd read this before but this time I noticed the hardware side of things.
The m0n0wall is FreeBSD based software router. Any way somehow a striped down FreeBSD install, with web front end has been shoehorned in to a 5 meg package! It looks very cool and in some cases very close in looks and functionality to the exoserver (or is it the other way around!?) Because it's so small and doesn't rely on swap space it can run on embedded hardware platforms. I was looking though the m0n0wall pages, when I came across this. It was this page that got me all fired up on the idea. There are some really cool uses of the embedded boards.
the boards are so small and low power that you could fit one in the a normal PC case (in a drive bay?) along with the main machine. You could then have a portable machine with it's own firewall/router, ideal for LAN parties.
I'm thinking that I need to get a desktop machine again (I've been laptop only for nearly a year now) and this would be a great idea for me. Okay yes I have the exosever which does a similar job, but hey I just want to build something.
More news when I have it.