LinuxQuestions.org - Tall order for a samba server

I administer a group of 25 windows 98se computers for an education program (read zero budget). I'm trying to find a way to eliminate floppy disks from my network, as they are totally unreliable. Students often lose work because the disks eventually just fail.

It occurred to me that setting up a file server would make things easier in all regards. However I need some pretty specific things out of the file server.

1) I need the students to only have access to their individual files.
2) Seeing as 98 has squat security all authentication would have to be on the server side.

I do not know if these are within the capabilities of samba. if they are, could someone suggest some resources I could look through to go about setting up a linux file server.