The Long Road to building a 10.3 Server... could use Tips!

Question

I recently acquired a copy of 10.3 Server (legal, new in package...) Unlimited license.
Quick background on my environment;
I'm the school computer guy for a K-8 school, and do the same job for another school a few hours a week.
Been working with Macs for 15 years... a fair amount of general experience with OS X, but very little with the Unix innards.
Here at my "main" school we have an old AppleShare 6.3 Server, Doing file serving only.
20 or so teachers and admin users, one "everyone" type account for Students (separate sharepoint for the student folders).
Client machines here are about 140 Macs (from iMac G3 to eMac G4 mostly), and 3 PC's with WinXP. All Macs are runnning 10.3.7 to 10.3.9.
I'm faced with wanting to "build" a new server (hardware and software) from leftover parts. The only budget for this project will be out of my own pocket (and they don't pay me real good). This is 98% for my own education and experience.. and 2% to move the school into the 21st century.
I have a G4 Gigabit Ethernet model, two Seagate 300Gb HD's, assorted RAM and smaller HD's to play with, and precious little else (I kinda finagled the 300Gb HD's by adding them to an order...). Figuring on making one the "primary" drive and the other a periodic backup (also considering a mirror-RAID, haven't decided).
I could use some tips...
How difficult, on a scale of 1 to 10, is setting up the following services in 10.3 Server;
Basic File Serving (my first goal...)
A NetBoot image/images? (my second goal...)
Other internet, web, and printing services are lower on my priority list.. ones I'll delve into later.
Server Hosted Home Folders/User Accounts (Intrigued by the idea, no idea if I'd use it).
Our internet service and DNS service is provided by our county office of Edu through a router and T1 line to the County Schools WAN. Firewall and security is handled by them. (not that I don't want to learn more than I know... but it's NOT a priority).
Naturally, I'll start by reading the documentation... but I'd appreciate any tips on OTHER reading material, or practical pitfalls if anyone has dealt with a simillar environment (and I know I may have left out details...).
Some direction is appreciated!
Paul F.

Answer 1

The hardware you have is certainly up to the task, so that's a good start.
After the basic install, setting up basic file sharing is no harder than a few mouse clicks - open Workgroup Manager, select 'Sharing', choose a folder to share, and define which protocols to share it via (AFP, NFS, SMB, FTP), and you're mostly done.
However, there's more to it than that, especially in a school environment. You'll need to consider user accounts (I'm guessing you don't want every file to be accessible to every user, including students), so you need to setup accounts, usernames, passwords, etc.
Now if your school already has a directory server of some description you may be able to integrate this server into that directory. If not you'll need to setup a series of accounts for the various users.
As for the other elements, NetBoot is a little trickier (OK, a lot trickier). You need to create an image (or series of images) for the different machines you'll be booting. It's not that hard to do, but it is time consuming.
The web serving and printer serving parts are pretty straightforward, too - a few clicks in Server Admin for each of them (other than creating the web content, of course).
The whole network home directory question can't be answered without knowing more about your directory. If there's an external directory already running in your network it's unlikely that you'll be able to use network home directories since you'll need to edit the directory in order to configure the home directory, and it doesn't sound like you have the keys to that.
If there isn't an existing directory and you're creating one on this machine then it's not a big problem. You'll define a directory on the server as being a valid home directory root, then as you create the user accounts you simply identify the share point where their home directory is located - the rest is automatic.
So none of what's on your list is a big problem. You haven't yet ventured out past the GUI admin tools that Apple supplies, and that's where it starts to get hairy.