A few thoughts:

If you're thinking colonization, plan to use and coordinate between more than one ship. You're moving at incredible velocities, but need to avoid a collision and need to not have long waits between arrival times, even though they'll all be following similar paths. An accident with a ship early in the launch could leave debris that is problematic for those that follow.

Even with a good sized fleet, the ships would have to be immense... too big to easily launch from the Earth's surface in one go. Use the moon as staging and assembly area where modules are pieced together to make a larger whole.

Talk about advances in using nuclear energy for propulsion. I don't mean (just) nuclear electricity generation, and I don't mean Orion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)]. I mean real research into more efficiently using the massive energy created from nuclear reactions to propel the craft in space. The steam=>turbine process we use today is just not very efficient at converting that energy into something usable, but in space there might be more options. Because of the risk of contamination, use conventional rockets to first reach the moon and for the initial escape when leaving the moon.

Just preparing the launch from the moon is a process that will take nearly a decade, so go epic and start somewhere in the middle.

Know how to slow down. You'll want to get the ship going as fast as you can. One benefit of somehow harnessing a nuclear reaction is the ability to constantly apply thrust. But you need to plan for a way to slow down as well. Use your destination's gravity to help. Since you're bringing a fleet, you might have a couple ships pass just too far from the planet, miss their chance, and shoot off into space with no hope of recovery before life support runs out.

Destination: you need a place where you can sustain, indefinitely, near-Earth temperature and gravity, water, breathable atmosphere, and the radiation protection provided by the outer layers of the atmosphere. Such a place does not exist outside of Earth in our Solar system, so you'll have to make one up.

First up is heat. The only thing in the solar system that puts out enough is the sun. Unfortunately, it has far too much heat for any planetary orbit closer in, and far too little for any planetary orbit further away. We're lucky Earth is the distance from the sun that it is. We'll have to make do the a gas giant, since they also radiate heat. They don't radiate enough heat, but it's the best we can, few people will know this, and it is fiction, after all. I propose Saturn. Prior missions to Saturn have taken a little over three years. With the upgraded propulsion, look to do it in about 1/4 that.

Next up is gravity. Humans can do very well on low-G, with astronauts spending over year in space without too many ill effects, so anything 1/4 the size of earth on up is fine. You ought to be able to pick a nice rock out of Saturn's asteroid belt. It's good to be a little on the small side, because that will make it easier for your colonists to leave their new home and mine Saturn's rings for resources. For water, let's suppose the particular rock is chosen because it just happens to have a nice supply underground. Your colonists will actually mine for water.

The asteroid will also have a cave system. Your near-future colonists will have no hope of terraforming a breathable atmosphere, so their plan will be to seal existing caves, and to create oxygen atmosphere within those caves by boiling it out of the water they mine. Good thing they brought a lot of uranium. The cave system will also provide the needed radiation protection in place of an atmosphere.

I think that about covers it for now.

From the sounds of it, Princeton doesn't even do NAT. They have a large block (probably A block) of real, routable internet IPs they hand out. As for the proxy, a lot of places I see are actually moving away from using a proxy that requires you to update setting on the client, and rather using a so-called transparent proxy (really just a router or bridge) as the default gateway set by dhcp that works because the only way to get to web is for traffic to go in one interface and go out the other.

Reading the article, they're using 1hour and 3hour dhcp lease times! The easy fix here is simply to bump the lease times back up to a few days, which used to be the default everywhere. Then IP addresses remain relatively static, and the broken behavior won't cause nearly as much of a problem. I understand there's a reason the lease is made that short, but I don't agree with that reason. What happens is that because wifi networks are effectively unswitched, you need to limit the scope/size of each individual network, to avoid broadcast traffic (like dhcp requests) consuming a significant portion of the available throughput. Thus, wifi SSID on campuses often tend toward and mere /24 or /23 address pool per SSID and area. But, you'll likely have a lot more than 512 devices move through that area over time. To compensate for this, a lot of places have lowered their lease times. I've seen lease times as short as 5 minutes. The justification is that most of these devices are mobile devices that only tend to be online for a few minutes at a time anyway. In my opinion, the result of this action is you have now just created a ton of the very kind of traffic that your were trying to avoid in the first place, as all your fixed devices and even some of your mobiles have to frequently renew their leases. I think a better approach is to allow a much larger address space per wireless zone. This way, you can have longer lease times, spend less wireless bandwidth handling dhcp traffic, and keep a more static IP pool that won't have as much of a problem with the broken dhcp behavior here. The downside is that the zone size has to stay the same -- you still don't want too many devices in the same zone at the same time (remember: allocated address space != actual online devices) -- and so you need to reserve a whole lot more addresses, maybe even switch to using the 10.0.0.0 space for your wifi to get enough for a larger campus (though that space is _easily_ large enough). Unfortunately, IIRC a couple of the major vendors have their controllers/access points set up to assume /24 zones, and that makes implementing this difficult.

Have you considered off-lease machines? At the school where I'm admin we get Core 2 Duos with 2GB RAM and a 1 yr warranty for $280 each.