Greetings,

<eat crow>
I have succeeded in converting my old P120 laptop into a
router/firewall.
Since you may not recall my previous statements, let me recap: I pointed 
out that laptops were not well suited as routers because of the heat 
buildup from running the hard drive continuously.  This was based on my 
experience replacing the hard drive in my laptop two times.

I have succeeded is using the laptop as a router/firewall by performing 
the following:
1.  Edited /etc/fstab to include /dev/ram to be mounted on /var/log
2.  Edited /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit to create a ramdisk.  Just after all
filesystems are mounted, untar /var/log.tgz into /var/log (ramdisk).
3.  Created new startup script to set hd shutdown via hdparm to one 
minute.
4.  Changed BIOS to shut down hard drive after 1 minute.
5.  Created a script in /etc/rc6.d and /etc/rc0.d to tar /var/log for
the next mounting (presumably when entering run level 3).
6.  Created a script that monitors hard drive activity and dumps the 
output to /var/log so I can tail it to see how often the hard drive
is shut down.

End results:
Harddrive runs for about 45 minutes after I last use the box, and
it stays off until the daily cron jobs kick in.  I'm tweaking that 
now as it is a pretty static system.
</eat crow>

Of course there was the security aspect, but that is another issue.

George