Hi,

Excuse my breaking into this very exciting thread :)

Isn't the important issue here more along these lines:

m0n0wall WORKS! It does so ALL the time, ANY time and with a large 
number of connections running a high load.

===

Most commercial firewall products can't be said to do so. For instance 
my D-Link had to be reset manually about once every hour, especially 
during "high loads" (on my 1Mbit WAN link!?!) I read about a lot of 
people having similar problems with firewalls and routers from 
Netgear, Linksys (or Cisco, which is the same thing) and others.

Also, take a look at what services m0n0wall offer (and the flexibility 
in configuring these services). Not too many commercial products will 
offer anything remotly close to this bundle. Unless we talk very 
expensive proffesional solutions, costing ten times the price of any 
reasonable hardware for m0n0wall!

Personally I run m0n0wall (generic-pc) on a 300MHz P2, with 256MB RAM 
and a 64MB CF card instead of a harddisk (I know, way too much, but 
that was the smallest of the old PC's in my brothers attic!)

I do plan to change to either a Soekris 4801 or a WRAP board in which 
case I'll probably use 64MB or 128MB RAM. I see no reason to be a 
mizer and try to get by with 32MB, after all it isn't the 70'es where 
I would need the bi-yearly produce of a small american state to pay 
for those extra 32Mb.

IMHO getting those extra 32MB (or 128MB for that matter) for your 
firewall is super cheap, compared to going out and getting a 
commercial product for $1000+ (which is what you'd have to pay to get 
the same services and throughput as m0n0wall running on any old PC or 
a 4801/WRAP board!) And I promise you they won't have a support that 
is anywhere near that of m0n0walls (like is the case, strangely 
enough, with most OpenSource vs. commercial products!)

Just my 2 cents! (Also I felt like defending Manuels hard work a bit, 
seing as it defends my intranet so well 24/7 :)

Adam.