Your concerns John Doe are why I choose to run a Linux router. If you want cute and fuzzy blinky blinky lights- get netgear or dlink or whomevers toothpick and duct-tape fortress and wait until some software engineering geeks decide it's time for a firmware update because bloody hell- somebody is causing stack overflows on their poorly tested products again. If they had safety inspections for routers like they do for most consumer products then those companies would be out of business.

If you want real security build your own router. Boot the OS from a removable disc, either a floppy or cdrom. If your router OS is installed on a hard drive then it can be written to- period.

As has already been pointed out, anything on a ramdisk will never survive a reboot. Assuming you don't leave the floppy in the drive or turn the write protection on you're in good shape.

Security is a matter of what it takes to make you feel secure. How do you fare in a port scan- a thoughrough port scan, not just the most commonly used ports from a site that wants to sell you wimpdoze security fixes. If you run a windows machine I would be extremely nervous about security- it has more holes than swiss cheese.

Think about this: I firmly beleive that it is not an option to be secure but rather, it is your responsibility. Afterall, what thrill is there in creating viri? You can't take credit for it so you need to hear about how many machines it affected. What if everyone was doing all that they could to be secure? Surely then hackers would lose much of their motivation and satisfaction.

I almost never install anything with a cute GUI based installer-why? They can't be trusted. If it's not open source it isn't on my box. If you're a windoze user you already know more than you ever wanted to about freeware apps and the extra *cough* features they sometimes bring along.

Build a router, make it small, make it cool looking- install Linux to your network machines, put each users /home directory on a seperate partition, don't get lazy with permissions and you will likely never reinstall an OS again.

Well ok that's not entirely true. You see...............Linux in and of itself is highy addictive and you will soon find yourself saying "so many distro's so little time".