Sweet little firewalls
I’ve been spending most of my week in training for netscreen firewalls. We’ve been using quite a few of the inexpensive SSG5 units (along with a few big hairy ones in the core network) to deploy all sorts of VPNs, firewalled networks and various network builds. These little boxes are quiet (no fans), small and really, really flexible. If you’re cheap and have a spare box, Devil-linux rocks, but if you don’t mind spending a couple hundred on ebay (or 6 ish new) you can pick up a sweet little box that’ll do everything from VPN tunnels (policy based or routed!) to running transparently on a network.