> I'm looking to setup an old i386 with a bunch of RAM (about 16M or so),
> a 1.4 MB floppy drive, and a pair of Ethernet cards.
> 
> The purpose of this machine is to:
> 
> 1)    act as a firewall between my nephews' ADSL provider (who gives out
> dynamic addresses)
> 2)    act as a print server using Samba
you will have a problem when printing large docs because (if you have no
HDD) you will need large /mfs in your ram. 
> 3)    provide network communictions between both my nephews.  One is
> using a Macintosh with a 10BaseT card, the other is using an AMD box
> with a 10BaseT card.
> 
> Both of them need to access the Internet and the single printer their
> family owns.
> 
> I would really prefer to use NetBSD for this since I've been using
> NetBSD ports (sparc and i386) for several years.  Does anyone have any
> ideas/suggestions as to how to start?
making one-floppy system for this could be difficult and almost impossible
for beginners (like me and probably you).

buy old used 80-200MB drive and sell this floppy - in poland it's similar
prices :)