reecommendations for an 'appliance" platform ?

[Pete French]

>   I'm not 100% sure, but fairly sure that you'll have a hard time
> finding something that combines the low-power standalone type spec with
> a 64-bit capable processor.  Once you get the higher-end processor,

That was my experiense when shopping around yes - annoying as I
don't need anything particularly low power (it ain't going to
be my leccy bill :-).

> becomes a more likely failure point, and so on.  Can you elaborate a
> bit more on which parts of that system spec you really need - do you
> need the GigE?  Two ethernets? The external SATA?

It needs to be:

1) Complete as purchased - I dont want to build a machine
2) Capable of having a simple boot device (e.g. CF card) dropped in
3) At least one ether port. 100 meg will do.
4) Small enough to be posted to the end user
5) Cheap - under 400 euros, preferably 300

I do not really care about processor speed, or memory, or power
consumption. It needs to run FreeBSD, and I would prefer amd64
as we havent written or used any of our code on 32 bit in a long
time, and I would feel uneasy that there might be laten bugs in
it if we simply recompiled it for 32 bit.

> I bought one of these from them last year:
>   http://www.fit-pc.com/new/fit-pc-1-0-specifications.html

Thanks for the links - thats pretty interesting! I notice the newer
ones are also Atom based, so similarly spec'd to what I was
looking at, but they may be more suitable.

cheers,

-pete.