Compact Freebsd 'appliance'

[John Almberg]

I have a client who has an application that he wants to deploy in his  
customer's offices as a headless 'appliance'. Basically, just a black  
box that you can plug into a Lan, turn it on, and it runs. No floppy  
disk or CD, no monitor/keyboard, just remotely managed.

This application won't store any critical data, so it doesn't need  
redundancy. It just needs to be reasonably reliable, compact, and quiet.

My first recommendation was to use a Mac Mini, but that excellent bit  
of hardware was deemed 'not professional enough'. So now I am looking  
for a compact pc that can run FreeBSD, of course. I think it probably  
just needs a power supply, tiny motherboard with onboard ethernet,  
usb, etc., and hard drive.

If anyone has a recommendation (or if their are any vendors lurking),  
please shoot me an email off list. I'll compile a list of  
recommendations and post it all at once, in case anyone else is  
interested in this.

Thanks: John -- jalmberg at identry dot com