Transferring medium-size NT fileserver to Samba; HOWTO...?

[mrhinelander at universityaccess.com]

Hello, we want to move the main fileserver for our office, a standalone
NT box, off NT and onto a Linux box running Samba.  On the NT box we've
got:  around 100 users, 20 groups, 10k directories, and 100k files.

I'm a Unix admin with nil Windows experience.  I've installed Samba
2.0.5a and have been poring over the docs and archives for a few days.
I find myself at a bit of a loss as to formulating a plan of action.

I presume that my situation is not unusual, so I am writing to this list
in the hopes that others might benefit, too.  My question is general:
how should I proceed, and where might I look for info specific to this
process?

I've found the NT utility cacls.exe which can be used to display
'owner/permissions' from the ACL for a given file.  My naive
understanding of the job is as follows.  I must ask your indulgence, I
know that 'naive' in this case will mean that I'm missing important
steps, and that I have misunderstandings with what I do have.  Having
qualified myself into a corner:

1)  'Freeze' our NT fileserver, so the files won't change
2)  use a perl script to call cacls.exe on each file on the fileserver.
save the results to one big output file
3)  somehow tar up the files on the NT box
4)  untar the tar file on the Unix box
5)  so now I have the data files and directories (um, right?), but
ownership/modes are incorrect; run another perl script to parse the
output file of NT permissions from step 2, and for each file, set the
ownership/mode, and if necessary, modify /etc/groups, and/or smb.conf.
This step is the one I'll find hardest, yes?
6)  turn it back on....

Okay, thank you, everyone!