Drew,
There's no better way to learn how to do this stuff than jumping in head first. Since you have a test box just waiting for Sambe 3, you are in a perfect postion to try it without hurting anything. Download the RH 7.3 rpms, install them and see what happens. If they install OK, but samba doesnt' work, then do a little research at
www.samba.org and/or post a question here.
This is what GNU is all about. I don't think I'm too far off base is saying that most of the people here are graduates of Linux school of hard knocks.

Greg Zartman