40 people is a lot without some serious output on your network pipe. Depending on your campus network connection, you're going to need gigabit if you have it, or multiple 100mbps connections.
You should also cap downloads too.
SCSI hard drives would be a good idea, or RAIDed Serial ATA. You don't want only a couple hard drives doing all the work.
CPU power isn't really an issue, a decent Athlon or P4 should be sufficient. 512mb RAM would probably be enough as well. You're really just doing file transfers.
Actually, you might be better off with more than one PC.
It all depends on your budget and the campus network!
ps... remote desktop is a good way to admin a box you're not using every day. I use it on my home network very successfully. An alternative is VNC. Its open source, so there's a few different flavors, my favorite is TightVNC.
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