Did you know that Gentoo Linux 2004.2 ships with a GCC ready for Stack-Smashing Protection? (SSP overview). For verification, just execute ‘gcc -v’ and see whether there is a SSP flag, e.g. like
gcc-Version 3.3.3 20040412 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.3-r6, ssp-3.3.2-2, pie-8.7.6)
To enable SSP for any newly compiled binary by default, just add -fstack-protector to your CFLAGS in /etc/make.conf.