I am setting up a unix remote print server for approximately 500 printers. We send about 1,000 print jobs per day over the WAN. I am looking for hardware specs. I know I can overkill, but would rather get a sensible machine. Any suggestions?
1000 print jobs per day is only about 2 per minute in a typical 8 hour work day. Thats a pretty light load. Any recent machine should be able to handle that pretty easily. Just make sure you have plenty of disk space to spool the jobs.
As PxT correctly points out, any modern CPU can manage the load you are talking about. Having plenty of disk space to queue/spool is good. Memory is also helpful. If you are just using a simple, widely supported printer, an inexpensive Linux (or other freeware UNIX) box will work just fine (memory and storage very cheap these days for Intel/AMD architectures).
If your printer requires special drivers or is only supported by certain platforms, you may have a different solution to consider. However, that would be the exception and not the rule. Also, some OS platforms have 'nice GUIs' to administer the printer(s) and print queues; others have simple ASCII files to manage (for example, /etc/printcap ).
Regardless of the OS and platform..... 128MB of memory and a nice 20GB disk cost (together) around $100.00 USD on eBay!! This is more than enough......
Even the new Macs with OS X use standard EIDE drives that are very inexpensive. 80 GB Maxtor drives have been selling on eBay under $200 USD !!