I might be giving up on the dream of using Asterisk purely as VM for a Cisco CM/CME based system. Why? MWI. From what I've found the only way currently to make MWI work in this scenario is to bash it together with custom scripts and cron jobs. Ugh. What a pain. I like tinkering and it could be fun but I have too many other things to do with my time.
The problem remains though that I need to get Asterisk off of the current laptop I'm running it on. A couple of days ago I stumbled across the good old Cobalt Raq. I have past experience with these from early web hosting days. I liked the systems a lot but the updates became too infrequent and the platform became very unsecure. What's cool is that the early Intel Raq's are on Ebay for cheap! They use some funky flash based firmware so they aren't as easy as using a straight Intel system but the method of converting it to a different distro, such as Debian, is pretty well documented. Plus, it's a shallow 19" rack mount with a 60w PSU. Perfect for running in the basement rack. Lightweight and light on the power.
I already won one of them and it'll be my new firewall. I'm going to try to snag a second one to be my Asterisk server and I'll just keep running chan_sccp. Should have plenty of power for my very small system.