this may reveal my ignorance, but what the hell. how would you set up a linux box to be a webserver/firewall for say a home network. would you put the broadband connection into the linux system and them back out into a wireless router? if so, how do you do this? are there ethernet out cards? as i said, this might reveal my ignorance, but i'd like to get a better understanding of how this works.

well basically yeah. a box with two ethernet cards, one for the internet, one for the internal connection. the webserver side is largely irrelevant in that scenario, generally you wouldn't run a server on your firewall, you would have a dedicated firewall and portforward to an internal web server. there are dedicated linux firewalls like ipcop and smoothwall, or you can take a server distro like CentOS and enable routing and firewall functionality on it, but it's not nearly as easy to manage as a dedicated firewall distro.

There's a lot of different options. If you already have a wireless router/firewall (I have a Linksys WRT54G), then IMHO the best thing is to setup the broadband into the router and then have the webserver in the DMZ (demilitarized zone) of the router if you want external access to it or on the inside of the LAN if you want it only internal.

If you want the linux box to do everything, then you need a machine with 2 network cards (plus one wireless network card if you want a wireless setup). Then you install your distro of choice and connect your broadband to one card, the other wired card to you hub/switch for all your internal machines, and use your wireless card for the wireless network. You'll have to enable things like NAT & masquearding (router stuff), iptables (firewall rules), DHCP server, etc