“Click… click… … click..!”
The sound started to come from the computer closet, and made me nervous. I had this one problem: There are a bunch of disks, of which two are a raid volume for my photos and files, and two scratch disks and such… But I finally found out the sound came from the firewall - my first ever PC. Some of you might remember “fun112″ - my first permanent net connection from the dorm, my screamingly fast Pentium 90 that was later overclocked to 100MHz blazing speed… 
So that 6GB Deskstar was toast. And having a full linux distro on the firewall/NAT host was kind of silly anyway, so I went looking for a diskless solution. Being an old PC, that box still had a floppy drive. I had used floppyfw at the aviation club, and it worked nicely. This time when looking for the floppyfw download site I also bumped into Coyote Linux floppy firewall and it surprised me pleasantly. It has a web-based admin UI and all, much like many of the ADSL routers out there. Pretty simple and nice to use!
So if you are looking for a simple, cheap router and have a junk PC around, give coyote a try, it made me happy.