All, While researching some power usage information for a standard PC vs an appliance router (assuming that gross power savings would make an appliance essentially 'free' compared to a 'free' pc that uses more power), I stumbled upon the Nokia IP530. Apparently Nokia makes really nice appliance firewalls (i had no idea).
While doing some research, I found this Wikipedia article [1] discussing their Linux/BSD (Depending on the rev) based operating system. The short description of the "xpand" daemon sounded interesting -- and I was curious. Are there any other projects out there to replace /etc with a data/metabase, and provide a legacy /etc emulation layer? While adding some "registry" like wizardry to Linux would probably ignore some furor, having built in versioning, changelogs, and other "cool stuff" that such an abstraction would provide sounds interesting. I know Apple has some such wizardry (though, more registry like, and it doesnt provide an /etc legacy layer). Are there others? 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_IPSO
