The first main glitch is with my NIC; for some reason it's giving me bogus errors about eth1 not having a valid wireless ESSID, which is really bizarre, seeing as I have no eth1 device, let alone a wireless device of any kind. I'll have to figure that out and squish it.
The next annoyance is that modprobe is whining on boot for some reason. No idea what that's about; probably going to take a few minutes with Ye Olde Googlemeister to solve that one.
While waiting on things on Milton, I started poking into the broken server issue. It looks like, for some reason, my router is not doing NAT correctly; Ethereal reports that connection packets are indeed arriving from The Outside World, but they're being discarded by the network stack for having invalid checksums. Buhhh? So that'll be another fun challenge to solve... but probably not tonight, seeing as I'm already pretty tired and don't feel like being a total zombie tomorrow.
So... let's see what kind of progress can be made on getting this sucker to boot cleanly as a 2.6 box. I'll consider it a successful night if I can get a clean boot before I pass out. Tomorrow I'll see about starting to download, build, config, and install Apache, PHP, MySQL, and all that cruft. I'll also need Webmin, because frankly no Linux server should exist without Webmin.