[K12OSN] Proposal due Monday, feedback welcome

[Dan Bo]

(The Baht can be converted to US$ by dividing by about
40)
In a casual conversation with my new school's
secretary while we were travelling to a seminar, I
mentioned setting up the school with computers. I said
that I could probably do it for about 90k Baht with
thin clients. Well, I have now been asked to make a
formal proposal to the school director on Monday, and
am looking for some feedback.

First, the requirements (or, since the director
doesn't know anything, what I look at as
requirements):

    * One or more servers to serve the thin clients,
    * About thirteen clients, scattered throughout the
school, though more if I can,
    * Software to handle document exchange,
scheduling, etc...
    * Software to administer the school and track
students,
    * Internet access on a dial-up which limited
numbers of folks can turn on or off,
    * Minimum admin work, able to be done by someone
as an extra duty (and not, me, though I will have time
to train). 

I am likely to:

   1. Buy two used Compaqs with dual PIIs and RAID
4.9GB disks X9 that I saw for 15K each recently
      Total cost 30,000 Baht;
   2. Bump the RAM on these to over a GB each
      Ttotal cost 6,000 Baht
   3. Purchase clients off a shipment from Japan ot
the US, P200s 32 MB RAM, 2MB video, at about 900 Baht
each
      Total cost 12,000 Baht;
   4. Monitors from Japan for 1,500 Baht each
      19,000 Baht;
   5. Buy an old PII to run Smoothwall or ?ECop? 3,500
Baht;
   6. Buy a new 16 port switch with one or two gigabit
ports and one or two gigabit cards for the servers
???? Baht;
   7. Use the rest to purchase mice and keyboards;
   8. Use IceWM with limited menus to limit the memory
consumption per client;
   9. Use one server for thin client use and the other
for scheduling software, documents, and mail. Rsync
the two servers nightly to allow me to turn services
on in case of failure of one of them.
  10. Use eGroupware, a fork of PhPGroupware, which I
have used before.
  11. Use Webmin to divide the admin tasks among
several folks.
  12. Possibly use SchoolMation 1.0, but survive on
eGroupware alone if I can;
  13. And try, for the first time in my life, to set
up an IMAP mail setup for use inside eGroupware. 

This is an order of magnitude beyond anything I've
done before, but I don't suspect that I'll have any
problems with this setup. Suggestions and/or flames
are welcome...
Daniel

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