those. The beauty of most appliances is that they're easy to manage. If it fails, download the latest ISO from company, burn it, boot appliance, restore it and you're back in business in an hour or so. Keep in mind a linux kernel running just ntpd and some management necessities like ssh and http is pretty reliable. Hardly any I/O, just a simple function it does.

http is a frilly pink bauble, not a management necessity. Very basic linux with no frilly bauble's, ntpd, sshd, and vi. Supports thousands of clients on a $10 80286 with 640KB RAM booting from a floppy. Add $1000 and you can get the same thing as an "appliance". --- () ascii ribbon campaign against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org