Not use stand-alone router/adsl card?

[#1]

Hello all,
I am on normal ADSL, nothing special. Looking at the map around me, everywhere else has FFTC - sad face. This area is served directly from the exchange, even though openreach says it's available in 'some areas', that's a total lie! there are no cabs in this area at all. Hopefully at some point we may get FTTP.
                                                                                                                                                                          (DMZ)                           
Anyway, moving on to my question.. my current setup is Internet ---> Thomson router ---> [NIC of my server] ---> Out of other NIC (Lan) -----> Switch ---> Devices
My old machine that acts as a server has a set of IPTable rules on it which I have added, some people may not agree but it's a full block of every Chinese/Korean and Russian CIDR I can find. I don't have any problems with these countries but there is also a massive amount of attacks per month that come from these countries and for the most part I have no real need to communicate with these countries (preventation of automated attacks). IPtables then also controls the port forwarding to my xbox, and other things such as only allowing SSH from specific IP addresses.
What I really want to do is skip the Thomson router part.
Am I right in thinking that if I had fibre, it's PPPOE I would be able to have my network card negotiate the connection and therefore bypass the router?
ADSL is PPPOA and therefore I'm going to need something like a router or PCI adsl card to negotiate the connection for me?
Regards,
Ben.

[#2]

You can reconfigure many routers to just act as a modem - see http://npr.me.uk/nbridge.html

[#3]

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Am I right in thinking that if I had fibre, it's PPPOE I would be able to have my network card negotiate the connection and therefore bypass the router?

Yes, as long as you have a pppoe client.

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What I really want to do is skip the Thomson router part.

You could always configure the Thomson for bridge mode ( see here http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,105753.0.html ) , ok so you'll still need the physical box but it will just act as an ADSL modem, so you will use a pppoe client on your server just like you would with Fibre.

[#4]

It has ubuntu installed on it so it could do PPPOE.
Trying to work out if there is any real benefit to me having the external IP assigned to the NIC of my server vs my current setup.
Current setup - default settings apart from: DHCP - disabled and DMZ - Set to NIC of my server IP (WAN side).
IP tables allows for the forwarding of XBOX live (and thats the usual pain in the a to get open NAT from)
I do have an old BTHUB3 kicking around, maybe I'll look into flashing that to use as a stand-alone ADSL modem.
MisterW - do you think there's any need for me to have it run in bridge mode?

[#5]

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MisterW - do you think there's any need for me to have it run in bridge mode?

Probably no real need, it's just a bit neater. If what you've got works, then leave it alone...

[#6]

I think I will, another reason for this decision is that if the power goes off/net goes down and I'm not home I would need to talk the mrs through reconnecting through PPPOE - and the machine is also headless..
Thanks for the replies all.

[#7]

Got bored, decided to tinker..
Using the cli commands from your other post and editing some of the iptables rules my external IP is now fully functional on one of my network cards inside my firewall.
Putting it into bridge mode is extremely easy, the only time consuming part was the editing of all of the iptable rules.