muddysmind.com

Ok....the only things I understood - or at least sound familiar to me is: wireless network and router/firewall.

NO! IpCop is da' Bomb!
:-)

IPCOP is nice and Gentoo is great (although gentoo takes lots of work and time to install and set up for such a limited use)... Both options are 'free' as in speech and beer but for a home router/firewall it seems like overkill to me. I understand the logic of "I have this rusty ol' PC collecting dust and i want to put it to work" but when you consider factors such as noise, size, ease of setup and long term energy cost (250-300w for a PC vs 65w or lower for commodity hardware) you can see that a PC based router, while being an extremely configurable and upgradable option, is not necessarily right for most home networks. I can understand wanting a full powered box for enterprise use (or if you need to use 3DES VPN), but in my opinion, small, energy effifcient wireless routers from linksys, dlink, etc are more than powerful enough for home use. Considering the raising energy prices worldwide and how low the prices of these (relatively) energy efficient commodity wireless routers have come as the market is saturated, any 'savings' by using your existing 'free' hardware and free OS may quicky evaporate into higher electric bills with 24x7 use, not to mention the value you place on several hours of your time or more to configure things just right.

My issue is that I've used the little home routers and I've found them to lack some of the configurability and options that I need. I've also had problems with them not working with all software. My wireless access point actually doubles as a router and 4 port switch. However I simply can not connect to any instant messaging servers from behind it!

My issue with Gentoo is that I don't have the ease of access that I have with IpCop. My issue with IpCop is that it intends for me to use the box for just being a firewall, even though the box is capable of handling some other network duties.

I just wish I could combine IpCop's interface with Gentoo's flexibility.

Dude, you can combine any options you want into IPCOP. Thats the beauty of it over small routers like the Linksys kind.

It is like beer. You can homebrew the heck out of it.

It becomes a pain to do so. It comes with no gcc, so you have to bootstrap a compiler. The kernel is a crippled 2.4 kernel, so to do some of the things I want to do, I'd have to recompile it. Then the biggest issue: no package management. With gentoo I can ever so easily install new software. Like say...samba. Or say I'd like to have my router double as a media box of some sort...I can do it, but I have to jump through hoops to do it.

As it is, my router is one box and I have a file server altogether seperate. I'd like to combine the 2, and I want the features and interface of ipcop, but I don't want the problems.