[Samba] Can SAMBA be useful for me ?

[Pareti, Joseph]

I am planning to set up a small compute farm consisting of x86 notebooks
on a switched ethernet lan. These only have one nic and limited disk, so
that I need to import a data partition from an external file server. For
this purpose I'd like 
to use a w98 PC that has access to internet over dsl. I envisage
connecting all machines to the ethernet switch using 10/100 links. The
ip addresses would be (i) the DHCP-assigned address for the w98 machine,
and (ii) local addresses for the linux machines, such as 10.0.0.*

Can I use SAMBA to turn the w98 box into a file-server and use the linux
notebooks as SAMBA-clients? Any links to good how-to sites, cookbooks
and the like would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Joseph