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Well, I'd start here.
and then maybe go to here.

Vertical
9 out of 10 men who have tried Camels prefer women!

stateful firewalls = excellent... But LRP will NOT readily support 2.4 kernal size!
(LRP is the Linux Router Project at http://lrp.c0wz.com/ a kick ass firewall/router/NAT distro that needs a single floppy, 486 or better, 2 nics, and NO harddrive!)

Joshua Jackson, of the impressive www.coyotelinux.com LRP distro,
said "I wish I could move to the 2.4 kernels for Coyote, but not in the floppy version I am afraid. By the time you get all of the necessary options built into the kernel, it is roughly 350kB larger than the 2.2 kernel... in addition, the full iptables and iptroute2 package are quite a bit larger than their 2.2 equivs. The Embedded project is already running on the 2.4.0 final kernel, but it does not run from a floppy."

-Nathaniel
Bummer for the rest of us.

2. Take e3 http://lrp.c0wz.com/files/e3/. It is only 5K as an executable.

You seem to forget that Windows et al have a whole bunch of .dll files that must be in place, so the exe size alone does not tell you too much.

Both ShareTheNet and Linux Router Project load the OS into a RAM disk. They do this for the sake of security (just reboot, and voila: new OS installation) and speed. I use a ShareTheNet router on a 386/33 and I regularly see D/L speeds in excess of 100KB/second.

BTW, is a cut-down version of OpenBSD still OpenBSD?

Okay I have to admit I don't know shit about BSD, but I could see the point to have such a project... Even if it's just to say to your boss "look pops, it's OpenBSD booting a write-protected media, it's bound to be secure!"

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lrp.c0wz.com

LRP is a Linux based router that boots from a floppy. It now comes in many flavors, sure to meet your needs. I'm running it on a 486SX/25 that I picked up for $10. How's that for a cheap router?

I wouldn't go too far in promoting them. I have been regretting using Linux Router Project on an old 486 or Pentium ever since I bought my Kingston 7 port switch/router. The problem with the Kingston is that only one computer at a time can use programs like Counter-Strike over the cable modem. The same thing goes for if I want to run a Counter-Strike server. This has become very annoying, and could be solved if I was using the Linux Router Project by simply configuring port fowarding.

It also annoys me to no end that I can't traceroute from my Linux box in my room.

[unrelated] How come all these great "Ask Slashdot" articles never get posted on the main screen?[/unrelated]

Well, there's always the ever-trusty Linux Router Project single-floppy distribution. That's exactly what it's designed for: a single-floppy that can do NAT/IP masq/routing etc. Unfortunately, Dave Cinege, the maintainer of the official distribution recently suffered a major systems failure, so the website might not be up. Might want to try the catch-all info site, lrp.c0wz.com for mirrors and better information, as the main site is outdated, anyway.

Also, there's a spinoff distribution using 2.2.x, and named after mountains. Previously there was Materhorn, and now it's Eiger, I think. It's maintained by Matthew Grant and is located at lrp.plain.co.nz.

There's also a commercial LRP spinoff called Coyote Linux. Looks pretty easy to use, but it costs money if you want a Windows-based disk creator (the free one is Linux based).

Trevor Marshall at Byte did a series of articles on using LRP as a home router. You can find them starting here to see how to have just a modem and your 10bT NICs set up. They continue here to add in DHCPd and 100bT cards, which teaches you all about LRP modules. Not sure there are any more in the series, but you can look around Byte's site.