[TriLUG] dead motherboard

[Greg Brown]

Well, I finally got around to putting my second Linux box together (AMD 
1.9 Ghz, 500 meg ram, fast FSB, blah, blah).  Anyway, the motherboard 
is dead which, I'm assuming, is due to static (it's been sitting around 
for months and moved around (albeit in a static bag) many, many times). 
  Anyway, so I have the chip and RAM.

I have two options and I"m curious for feedback.

Option one is fairly simple.

Take chip, get AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE board with two 10/100 interfaces, 
built-in graphics, 2 USB, one serial, and that's about it.  I want to 
use my fast RAM if all possible.  I'm talking about as tiny of a board 
as I can find.  Does anyone know of a super-small board which will 
accomadate AMD chips?  I want to use only the ports built into the 
board and I'm not interested in running any cards.  I know of some mini 
boards that take Intel chips, but I don't know of any that take AMD 
with built-in graphics and dual 10/100 ports.  Anyone know of anything 
like this?  A 1U board and case would be okay, but I'm looking for 
REALLY, REALLY small to make a custom case for.

The second option is more interesting.

How about creating a diskless station to boot off CD (also replacing 
the bios with LinuxBIOS) to use as my firewall.  The theory that I had 
would be that if the OS is burned to CD and loaded into RAM at boot 
then it would be harder to hack.  A hacker could gain access and 
possible change some configurations but once it's rebooted from ROM and 
the LinuxBIOS it should return back to it's original config.   I'm not 
interested in running a web server but if I were I suppose I could 
change the iptables file, burn a new CD and reboot and VOLIA - port 80 
would be open and forwarded to my other machine.

Is a configuration like this possible?  Is it not a good idea?  Or just 
a stupid idea for some reason that I'm not seeing in my sleepy fog?

Greg