[clue-tech] necessity of external hardware firewall

[Greg Knaddison]

Howdy,

For my home desktop I've always followed the advice from my Linux
books that said something like "The firewall that ships with Linux is
pretty decent, so just use that and don't worry about an external
device."

I'm about to get a dedicated server to run typical website services:
www, smtp, imap, mysql, etc.  Is it worth getting an external
firewall?  What factors would impact your decision to have an external
firewall for a server?  Are there some features of hardware firewalls
that make them worthwhile above the firewall already available?

This will be a RHEL box and I will only have this one machine.  I can
foresee using multiple RHEL boxes (web + DB) at some point.  The data
on the machines is just "typical stuff" i.e. not medical records nor
financial institution records nor...

Thanks for your thoughts,
Greg