Low Power Hardware for a Linux Based Router / Firewall

After about 2 years of using NETGEAR FVS328 router / firewall with
extreme disappointment, I am ready to give up on it. Yeah, it cost me
almost $200 but it is so buggy and less functional than an older Linux
RH 6.2 based firewall that I built many years ago, it's not even
funny.

Dealing with NETGEAR's customer (dis)service was horrific, too. What's
more frustrating is that shortly after I purchased this router/
firewall brand new, NETGEAR decide to cease releasing bugfixes for its
firmware. And let me tell you, its firmware is embarassingly buggy. Up
until that experience I used to prefer NETGEAR products because of
their fanless design and the professional metal encasing, but now I
vowed to never purchase NETGEAR products again (not because of one ill
designed product, but because of their useless warranty and customer
support attitude).

So... after this introductory ranting, I am basically determined to
build my own router / firewall - based on Linux. This is something I
have done in the past very successfully and so I believe that this
will give me the ultimate solution.

For this project however, I am not interested in running Linux on any
PC hardware, but rather use very low power platform - preferrably less
than 20 watts (and preferrably fanless).

So far, I managed to find a very nice candidate: the Linksys WRT54G
(and its variants):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G

However, despite the wealth of information in the above Wikipedia
article, it is unclear to me whether this cute little box can provide
me enough flexibility and power to run iptables, provide adequate
logging, provide DNS caching and NTP service and support VPN. Also, it
would be great if my "hardware of choice" could have an RS-232 for
connecting to a modem as a backup connection.

Which probably means that I may need to forego the < 20W ideal ?

I know about the VIA mini-ITX option, but that seems to be an overkill
(price and power consumption) - especially when it has only one NIC,
no modem - and requires additional components to become useful. It
seems to be more suitable for a low-end multimedia machine.

Thus, my question to you is: Do you know about additional options or
alternatives that can allow me accomplish the goal of implementing my
own Linux based firewall? Any tips, pointers, URLs and other
information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Lynn

P.S. Anyone knows whether the WRT54G uses a fan to dissipate heat?

.

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