I'm planning to do a rather slim install of freebsd on a box for a gateway; Rather than using a 'router' distro, I'm just going to use a standard install disk and keep it as slim as possible. If you've got the hard disk space, and the time & energy, this may be an option for you, jhu. Though I'm not entirely sure whether anyone has written PPPoE support for bsd; I've had no will to search for it to date.