[luau] Oceanic cable modem service

[kilauea]

Aloha ! I haven't been on the list in quite some time. Just had a 
question about cable modem service. Oceanic will be hooking up my 
service in the next week and I wanted to find out if there is a current 
FAQ or HOWTO on Oceanic (Road Runner?) service. A couple of years ago I 
had a one way cable modem (HSA Kauai) and used DHCP to get an IP 
address. The Oceanic service will be two way: Most Excellent.
Is there any thing else I should be thinking of:  /etc/hosts, 
/etc/hosts.allow, gateway setting, firewall settings? I know enough to 
tweak things but I am far from a sys adm in understanding. I have a 
couple of machines on a home network. How should I configure the 
firewall on the machine that connects to the cable modem? I have Grub 
booting four flavors of Linux (Slack and RH primarly) and I am mostly 
interested in web and ftp access.  Any examples or pointers will help; I 
will try LDP for the latest Howto (DHCP / cable modem).
Also they want to use the USB port. I had my last cable modem connected 
by ethernet and don't know if there is any special settings needed for 
USB. I have fast ethernet running already but I have not used the USB 
port before although it looks like the ports are recognized.

Mahalo, Kilauea