I decided to give MNF a try after using squid within Mandrake 9.0 for a proxy server.

However, I can't for the life of me get the server to access the internet. The box has two NICs and I know I'm using the right one (eth1) because I use eth0 to do remote admin. My boot protocol is DHCP and the DHCP client /sbin/dhcpcd.
During startup it claims that the cable link is bad and tells me to "check cable". Well, the cable works because that's how I'm able to connect right now, so that's not the problem either.

Yes, the cable modem does work. :-)

Any thoughts at all? I have no idea what I need to reconfigure here

Have you tried resetting the modem?

Are you sure you shouldn't be plugging the cable modem in eth0?

See my signature below

Yes, I reset the modem every time I tried something new.
I also tried plugging it into eth0.

Ifconfig wouldn't return a value for eth1 until I ran ifup eth1 or ifconfig eth1 down and ifconfig eth1 up.

Then, after doing that, it still wouldn't bind to an IP- even after I reset the modem.

Since it's fairly important that the server remain operational, I had to scrap MNF and go back to the trusty squid setup with Mandrake 9.0. Perhaps some other time I'll give it a go