Yes! I have finally reached my goal in life.
Someone found my site when searching for "setting up a linux file server" in Google. In fact, my site was only three from the top. So, for those of you wondering how to go about this exciting task, allow me to refer you to a few places.
HOWTOs:
SMB-HOWTO
If you need to know how to set up a basic network:
Home-Network-mini-HOWTO
But the underlying principles are:
1. Get your basic network put together (allowing you to ping the server from the client machines, etc)
2. Get and install Samba. It comes on virtually all distros, if it's not already installed, install it.
3. Set up the smb.conf file in /etc. (/etc/samba on Debian)
4. Test your new file server. If it doesn't work, go back to step 3, read the samba documentation and try again.
5. If all else fails, get in touch with me at (ahoyt at myrealbox dot com).