I am planning to set up a PC that can function as a firewall and an Asterisk server. After installation, it must be configurable and administered remotely, because no input devices nor monitors will be attached.

I do not want a hard drive, because all of my old ones are much too noisy. The problem is that the motherboard does not support booting from a USB device. So I cannot boot with a USB drive. Is it possible to use a bootable CD or floppy disk to enable access to a USB drive, whence Linux is loaded?

Thank you in advance!