3. they cost almost as much as a new netbook but have serious deficiencies in CPU power, RAM, and storage.
the lack of RAM in particular would make it painful to run memory-hogging services like bind9 and squid.
Can't argue there, although they're getting better -- 32MB to 128MB this generation, compared to 8MB to 16MB in the previous generation.
Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH2AP Wireless N 5 x Gigabit ports 64MB RAM 32MB Flash USB2 port <$100 (according to shopbot) Supported by OpenWRT trunk, so presumably full support in the next release, but trunk works fine. The wiki page says that the models with A1 A0 next to the MAC address don't work but I have some of those and they work well. I run squid and bird (OSPF routing) on a few of them and there is still plenty of headroom. I'd question whether bind9 would be the right choice to run on a little router like that, maybe better off having something that can just run as a secondary if you can. James