[Samba] Can samba do this?

[Paul McCloghrie]

Hi all,
I don't currently run samba and I'm a bit of a novice at networking. Anyway 
here is the problem.
My office/company has a fair sized windows network - 500 or so machines. For 
some of my applications linux is far more useful so I want to build a 
sub-network of 3-6 linux machines and connect to the windows network. The 
only essential function would be file tranfer in both directions. What is 
the easiest way to do this?
In my head I have a picture of a mini-network of the linux machines, one of 
which is running samba and is connected directly on a machine on the windows 
network but this is just a standard XP machine (the one on my desk) not a 
server. I think that the machine on my desk will be able to see and write to 
the linux network via network neighbourhood. Will all the linux machines be 
able to write to the windows network though, or even just to my desktop 
machine (NTFS discs if that makes a difference)?

Thanks for any advice, but can you make it easy start very basic because 
networking is an entirely new thing for me.

Paul

PS. I'm digesting

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