LinuxQuestions.org - I'm a slacker in need

At last, I am a slacker :D

A little history, to shed some light on why I changed:

After using Red Hat on my gateway boxen for about a year, I started to have some serious issues with it crashing on me. I had a hard time believing it was an OS fault, and instead convinced myself it was the hard drive. However, after a few days of kernel panic pandemonium, and the final crash and burn, I replace the HDD witha known good one and... nothing. SO, my old box is dead. Not surprisingly though, being a P133 from 1996 that has been running virtually non-stop for those 6 years.

So, I stole my girlfriend's 233MHz P55C and gave her my secondary gaming rig (also a P55C, but 208MB RAM and a Rage128 card *sigh*).

I was planning on installing RH 7.3, but I have to tell you, now that I have learned more about Linux, I'm pretty sick of RPM's, all the bloatware RH likes to install, and that damn red hat.

Anyway, to my question (I swear I have one here somewhere). Everything went surprisingly smoothly installing Slackware, took about 1/3 of the time as Red Hat and everything was MOSTLY okay when finished.

This computer will be used as a gateway for my LAN (I'm on Verizon ADSL, so I'm using rp-pppoe), a firewall, web server and FTP server.

Slackware did not detect my second network card, though with a little research I found that my Netgear FA311 uses the natsemi driver, so I ran 'modprobe natsemi' and it picked up the second NIC.

Now in order to get my adsl connection and IP MASQ started after booting, I have to run the following commands (in this order):
$ modprobe natsemi
$ ifconfig eth0 down
$ ifconfig eth1 up
$ adsl-start
$ ifconfig eth0 up
$ ./rc.firewall

Firstly, will I need to recompile my kernel with the natsemi driver, or will it be simpler than that?

Secondly, how can I avoid just putting these commands into my rc.local file? I would like my firewall started up right after networking services are initialized, then both ethernet interfaces and then my adsl-connect.

*whew* Sorry for the mad novel, I'm just excited to get away from RH (albeit one dead Pentium :( ). Any help would be, um... helpful... I'm still a quasi-newbie but I think Slackware wil be a much better environment to really learn GNU/Linux.

Thanks in advance.