I recently obtained a 486 (Old Acer tower), with lots of nifty stuff: and
old QIC-80 tape backup drive, 16 MB of RAM, coprocessor, and a CD-ROM. Only
thing it didn't have is a hard drive, which I can add if necessary. The
computer even has two 3Com Etherlink III cards. One with an and rj-45
socket, the other with a serial style port for an external box and a coax
socket. There's also an internal ISA modem, but I haven't managed to find
any information on it yet, but I suspect it's probably not going to be fast
enough that I'd want to use it for any great length of time.

As it's a shame to let a still working machine go unused, and since it's
much quieter than my old Pentium 100 box I'm hoping to use it as a gateway
for my home network. Currently I'm looking at Smoothwall, E-Smith and
Coyote Linux.  While I have occasional access to a computer with a DSL
connection I'm connected here at home over a plain old 56k modem (external,
so I can move it over to the 486); so, since I beleive I've heard people
here say they've used all three of those I thought I'd ask for comments
before taking the time to download one or more of them.

First, a floppy only system would be nice, but isn't a requirement. I've
got a spare 800 MB drive sitting unused as an emergency spare. And it
should run on a 486, but I don't expect that to be a problem :-)

My biggest desire is for a gateway that will connect to the internet only
on request. That is by conscious decision, not simply because some dail on
demand daemon noticed that someone on the network started up their email
software and that it automatically tried to download the newest messages.
We only have one phone line, so not unintentionally making it busy is
important. I seem to recall from my looking at the three mentioned
distributions that at least one could be set so you would connect and
disconnect by going to a local web page and simply clicking on a button.
Having the connection be dropped after a time out period would still be nice.

Anything past that is a bonus.

I suppose my biggest request is for comments on Smoothwall, E-Smith or
Coyote linux from anyone who has used them. They all look good, at least
from the information on their websites, but nothing beats hearing from
someone with experience.