as long as we're doing hardware design on the nanog list again, i'd like to mention that there's a little device that sits on an ISA bus and has an onboard PCIC (PCMCIA bus controller). to this one attaches a pair of 50-pin ribbon cables, and to these one attaches a device that fits physically where a 3.5-inch floppy drive would fit (which means you generally need a 5.25-inch expansion mount, cost:$3.00). the whole thing costs about $150. if your UNIX-like system that runs on an ISA bus also would run on a laptop and knows how to support PCMCIA devices, it will see these slots as completely normal. and if you put an NCR WaveLAN into one, you have yourself an ether/wireless router. and if you put a 20MB ATA Flash card into it, it looks like a (slow) file system. and if your ROM knows how to boot from ATA (as it might if it can boot from an ATA CDROM), presto: BSD router, no moving parts. naturally you need to edit the hell out of /etc/rc to make it build a big ramdisk, populate it from the Flash's binary tarball, and chroot to it before starting gated. the chroot'd /etc/gated.conf should be a symlink to a small config file system on a second ATA Flash. "/", even though a RAM disk, is mounted read-only. system upgrades are done by powering off the unit, replacing "drive 0" with an updated 20MB Flash card, and powering it back up. caveats: 20MB isn't very large for a BSD system, even with shlibs -- you have to be highly selective about what you take; also, for /var/log it is probably a good idea to include a rotating magnetic media, unless you're going to use syslog's "remote log server" mode, which since it's UDP is not reliable enough for some forms of auditing that i've needed to design for. hope this helps.