Cheap device for hosting Cacti and Nagios?

[NightMonkey]

Hello. I have a number of non-profit clients I serve doing IT and Networking support. I've been looking around for options for cheap, low power and low maintenance devices to drop on their networks to act as Nagios and Cacti monitoring/trending alert devices, and perhaps some small room for growth. I've looked at lots of options, including a SheevaPlug to Gumstix to the SuperMicro Atom server (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product), and to Micro-ATX-based devices. I'm looking for something that is small. It doesn't have to be rack-mountable. Do folks have some favorites that they've used successfully for such low-tech projects? Did you use OpenWRT, roll your own Linux distro, or ... ?

Just as a note, some of my clients indeed have servers (of the Windows variety), but some are so small that they don't. It would be my preference to have this purpose wholly separate from actual end-user serving devices. I'd also love a solution that can be as "cookie-cutter" in their reproduction as possible.

Thanks in advance! Links to good forum posts are welcome, as my own searching didn't come up with much on this topic.

[TheWitness]

I'd get a Buffalo NAS and hack it, put Debian on it an call it a day. However, it's relatively slow, so it can't do a lot of devices (<30). But it's only 17watts.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0298596

TheWitness