On Wed, 05 Apr 2006 09:16:04 -0300, Bruno Robichaud said:
> Hi, I only want you know what your thing of that system and is it enough?
> 
> Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533FSB CPU

Plenty of CPU unless you're doing a *lot* of lists and mailings.

> 512MB PC3200 DDR Memory

Memory is cheap.  Go at least 1G or maybe 2G.

> 80GB ATA 100 Hard Drive 7200rpm 

This should be enough as long as the I/O rate stays down.  Most reasonable
operating systems will use added memory as disk cache - another reason to go
to 1G or 2G.  At higher traffic volumes, a large portion of your system disk
time will go to checkpointing - even if all the data is in RAM, it still has
to write to disk just in case of a crash.  A journalling filesystem like
the Linux ext3 filesystem can help a *lot* here.  What kills your performance
isn't the data transfers, it's the seeks - and if you have a lot of RAM,
a journalled filesystem can start acting like a log-based filesystem - you
end up doing primarily linear writes to the journal area with very few seeks,
and then do writeback to the main area of the disk when mostly idle.

Of course, if you're doing Windows, you're basically stuck with NTFS.

A bigger concern is that this isn't RAID'ed or mirrored in any way, which
increases the chance of you getting stuck if the disk dies.  I usually specify
hot-swappable RAID-5 across at least 3 to 5 disks for this sort of thing.

And whether it's RAID or mirrored or not, you *will* need to back the
system up somehow.

> 52x CD-ROM Optical Drive
> Dynatron D33 1U Cooler with 90° Blower
> Real 256bit 2D/3D Graphics

These probably won't matter to Listserv performance.

> 10/100 Network Interface

This might matter if you're only running the net at 10Mbit, for high traffic.
Try as I might, I haven't managed to swamp the interfact at 100mbit with
production traffic...

> Slim 1U Rackmount 19.5” Deep w/ Front USB

A 1U form factor limits you on things like how many disk bays you have. For instance,
you simply can't fit 5 hot-swap disks on the front.  You should be able to find
a 1U that lets you have mirrored hot-swap disks at least, though.  I don't know
if the unit you are looking at supports it.

> We will put windows server 2003 on it, is with a system like that Listserv

If you're insisting on Windows 2003, you *will* need LSMTP as well.  If you
were using some Linux or *BSD variety, you could use Sendmail or any other
reasonable MTA software that comes with the system.