As a storage admin for a decent size (1000+ employee) company, I get this argument from management every day. We can go out and buy a terabyte for $50! How hard is it to justify 10TB for project X?

Answer: Your USB drive (or internal SATA drive, or cheap single desktop RAID solution) has neither the performance, reliability, or feature set required by a modern datacenter.

A standard (7200rpm) USB drive can get around 320 IOPS. A single application in an enterprise environment, serving multiple users, can easily require 20,000+ IOPS at the database level. An environment like the SSA could easily have dozens of apps serving the same number of users (employees, not even counting customers). How many USB drives do you plan on connecting? How are you going to maintain, monitor, and expand your 1000's of daisy chained USB drives? How many millions are you going to spend designing, implementing, and maintaining an interface to control them? How much to train people to use it?

Enterprise storage solutions from EMC, NetApp, 3Par etc. help control the issues above, but they don't come cheap. A terabyte of space for a NetApp filer, if you count licensing, training, power, cooling, disaster recovery etc., will run you easily $10,000 / TB. EMC storage can be double that.

I can't guess how much data they need to store, but knowing that they have 106,000 employees, and knowing that my company has around a thousand, even if they needed only a tenth as much storage as us, they're looking at 10 petabytes, or $100,000,000 in storage. If you budget roughly the same amount for network and server hardware, then about as much as both combined for application development, support, transition, and staff, then throw in a final $100,000,000 for government waste and bureaucracy, you're pretty much right on target.

WebMin is a web based GUI system admin tool great for people who are at your level; specifically, you have some build experience, a smattering of Linux knowledge, and a clear understanding of your goals.

Hope the following helps with your issues: Client / Server: Each of the workstations can be set up to "phone home". Select the "Webmin Servers Index" option

- View client computer status: "System and Server Status"

- On/off, sleeping etc.

- Deny internet access, not LAN, just the web: "Webmin Users", can schedule time

- Block access w/Squid

- Remote virus scanning of client machines, or scheduled task;

Unnecessary if you'll put a basic Linux distro on the clients

- Some kind of hardware monitor, high temp / fan speed low etc "Hardware"

- Email alerts for various log files / alarms. "Monitoring"

Hope that helps. It's not even a steep learning curve, and you get to ignore the viruses and adware they were going to pick up anyway.

It's highly unlikely that you'll get one.

What most of the people posting here don't understand is the loyalty that Thais have towards their king. Note that this is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the monarchy in general.

King Bhumibol has brought incredible change to Thailand during his reign, including improvements from irrigation to public restrooms (my personal favorite). In the recent ousting of the Thai prime minister, supporters of the PM wore pink to support the king. The opposition wore yellow to support the king. Notice a pattern here? Good luck with your translator. Let me know how that works out for you :-)