I have a friend who recently put together some spare parts and bought a few new ones and built out a really nice router/firewall for his home. Basically he has it running gigabyte ethernet to his house which allows him to monitor and shape all the traffic to his children and the rest of the house. He does have a wireless gateway as well, but the wired pcs all go through this box.

Has anyone else had any experience building their own router/firewall for their wired connections? What advice would you have for someone considering doing this themselves?

There was/is a software called IProute which runs in DOS mode (version 6.22 for sure, probably lower too) and you can run it with no hard disk and with 1meg or ram. I think the slowest system you could run it with was 386/25Mhz!

What this all means is that you can have a dirt cheap router if you want.

Oh yeah, software was shareware, but pretty much is now into abandonware. There is Yahoo user group for that software.