Thing the first:
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 does not support teamed NICs on the host.

This bit us on the arse earlier this week when we teamed the NICs on the hosts of our virtual environment. As a result, although we could RDP to the host desktop, all our guest machines dropped off the network. A colleague is sure that with a bit of tweaking we could get Virtual Server to play nice with the (HP provided) teaming drivers, but we didn’t really have time to mess about with NIC configuration when there was an environment to build and documentation to write!

Thing the second:
m0n0wall is even better than when I last used it (several years ago). Its packet-shaping feature set is very useful if you want to simulate, for arguments sake, a low bandwidth lossy link between two networks. More on this and how to set it up in a virtual environment later.

Thing the third:
Turning off DHCP Client and Computer Browser on a Windows 2003 Server in an AD domain will break more than you might think. Specifically: the ability to register itself in DNS.

net start dhcp
net start browser

Thing the, aw hell, enough counting… Vodafone’s MobileConnect card will hang onto a 3G connection far longer and with far greater success if you configure it so that it’s *not allowed* to fall back to GPRS.

And finally, the commute from Winchester to Bristol is actually pretty reasonable – as long as you have a comfortable car!