PowerMac 5400 as server/gateway?

[Jay Savage]

My department is slowly moving into the 20th (maybe even 21st) century and buying the faculty G4s.  This is leaving several PowerMac 5400/120 machines (basically a Performa 5400CD purchased through the Apple Buy education program) sitting in the hallways collecting dust.  Yes: it's really been that long since they upgraded equipment.  Since the machines are so old that they were purchased outright by the department and not leased through the IT dept., it looks like the chair is ging to let me have one to play around with.

My question is: how suitable would this machine be as a gateway and experimetal web/mailserver?  It only has 10BaseT (and maybe AAUI as well?), but since my DSL is only 768k downstream and 128k upstream, it doesn't seem like bandwidth is an issue, and the rest of my network behind it will still run through the 10/100 hub (or 10/65, as the case may be--it's linksys ;-} )  And while the machine isn't fast, especially with that 603e chip, if I max out the ram and drop in the L1 cache, it's shouldn't be *too* bad.

On the other hand, I've never done this before, and I'm not sure how much impact the cpu has in the machine's performance as a router, although i seems like most routers and switches don't has much processing power.

i'm also interested in experimenting with it as a webser and possibly mail server, and--since my server experience is basically limited to OS9 websharing and a small ftp server based no directions from this list--I'm not sure how much processor time and RAM those operations use.

I think I'll stop rambling now and hope someone has something to say.

Sorry for the lengthy post,

--jay

P.S.

I'm looking at YDL 2.1, since I've tried to load 2.2 on one of the one's at school and failed miserably, although it may just have been the 8 megs of RAM.