Pollin.de, a Germany based electronics (and more other stuff) distributor, offers a cheap through-the-hole ethernet capable microcontroller board featuring an ATmega32 and an ENC28J60. This can be used with an Arduino bootloader as a cheap alternative to enter the world of LAN experiments, from NTP client to sensor server. I actually use it primarily as an MQTT publisher for temperature and humidity measurements, but the actual use is rather "unlimited" (except for memory). With an alternative ATmega644 or 1284 even the memory limit may be eased. A corresponding conversion to pure 3V3 power supply even brings down overall power consumption. A neat little board to play with - especially for such people like me, with clumsy fingers hating to get toasted soldering SMD ;-)