Well, my comment got eaten, so here's the horribly summarized variant.
The captive portal, DHCP, DNS, firewall/access management, VLAN tag/trunk management, route management, VPN tunnel management, SNMP Poller, SNMP server, network device controller services running on the internet access gateway for sports stadiums on commodity hardware running Linux. Or those same services running on a resource constrained system with significantly lower traffic.
This is obviously a scenario where Node.js is infeasible (web based portions had to have C bindings for anything outside of presentation layer and all parts of the systems required significant profiling and optimizations to meet speed and resource usage requirements). However, I've had several applications recently where Node.js could have been a possibility, but the documentation and overviews for it are either so beginner that you can't determine what it's capable of or is exploring areas where there isn't precedent for what it can do. I couldn't find a straightforward list of supported features and the ideal use case for it.
After expecting a more detailed article covering ideal usage of Node.js, and that not being it, I figure I would finally break down and ask "What is Node.js' ideal usage? Under what scenario is it an ideal tool?" It's not a knock against Node.js at all, maybe a slight one against the documentation, but not the technology or its use.
I only know networking basics, so not sure about your other use cases, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful something like 'http-proxy' for node is.
I use it to serve up several hosts on the same ip, or split sections of my url namespace into several node.js servers.
Maybe look at NodeJitsu blog as the articles seem readable, and those guys seem to use node heavily for running their hosting platform.
And yet you describe something which sounds ideally suited to Node (or any evented system) and call it infeasible. Node actually has pretty nice bindings to C (well, really C++), and I see nothing in your post that it would be incapable of.
If it was because you don't know (and didn't want to learn) Javascript I could understand, but in terms of your comment above it seems like you just didn't look hard enough.
not sure why you're being downvoted here, but I do agree on the c++ binding infrastructure. I think the things he listed are quite possible in node -- I can't see any of those things he listed that might be cpu bound.
A fairly popular small DNS system was written in node for the purposes of development. Anyone who uses "pow" knows what I'm talking about: http://pow.cx
