Mark [1] and I went to help John, the paper millionaire of a dotcom, set up his home network. He has a cable modem and no static IP addresses so it's a matter of configuring a Linux box to act as a firewall and IP masquerading.
John, being a paper millionaire of a dotcom, can afford to buy insanely high end PC equipment and his primary box, dookey is an insanely high end PC. I don't remember the details off the top of my head, but it's this large box the size of a small refriderator you'd find in a college dorm room. And it's running Linux.
The installation went fine. The only problem we encountered was a problem in getting an IP address via DHCP from his cable provider. The problem ended up being his currently assigned IP address was bound to a MAC address from his Windows system, so we swapped the ethercards (not wanting to wait for the timeout period) and instantly we had a good connection.
Three commands later and we had IP masquerading working on Linux.