We wanted the Appliance version of the webbrick to be able to run Apache as a secure proxy for accessing the gateway from external to the building. Apache security is very strong, and therefore we wanted to use this to provide an HTTPS connection which then proxy's to the gateway.
Other issues with the slug. What sort of disk to install the software on. We had a USB flash memory device in one of the USB ports to hold the required software. We may come back to this if a low end system without external access support becomes a large requirement.