Since I got a whole week off between Christmas and New Years I did a lot of work on my home network.  I upgraded all of my machines to the latest possible versions.  I even moved my router/firewall from Gentoo to Debian Lenny system.  This was a big job since it was not a simple upgrade.  I also moved it from a hard disk based system to a CF card one.  This seems to work great.  Basically CF card gets mounted as read-only and everything that’s needed during system run is written to a temporary filesystem in RAM.  This goes around the problem where CF cards die if a number of writes exceeds around 100,000, or so depending on a card.  The instructions I used are available here, they are a pretty good start, but I needed to tweak them a bit to get everything I need for this machine to work, mainly DNS/DHCP server and webmin.