I've been keeping my eye on embedded computers lately, particularly the Soekris 4801. Well, I finally bought one. These little computers are really cool. You can install Linux or BSD on these little devices and pretty much have them do whatever you want. I didn't get a hard drive with mine, I'm going to use an old 512 MB Compact Flash card to hold the OS, which will be more than enough room for what I'll be using it for.
You can use these embedded systems for a variety of things, but I am going to install m0n0wall on this device. As it says on the m0n0wall web site:
m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software).
m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server, PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent.
This should be a fun project. I'm just hoping that my FIOS connection doesn't give me any issues with the new gateway because it's pretty particular about what device is connected to it.