There is a book on securing and optimizing linux on the www.tldp.org website. The first edition is Red Hat based. The second edition leans toward Red Hat and SuSE. Some of the info may be old, but it makes for a good study.

Since you would access the server remotely, you could ssh into the server from your workstation or laptop and run the YaST2 GUI programs that way. You don't need a full KDE or Gnome installation on the server. Also, the less you install, the easier it is to secure.

Either the samba installation or installing samba-doc supplies three book on samba:
Samba 3 Howto and Reference Guide
Samba 3 By Example
Samba 3 Developers Guide

Be sure to look at the first two books. They are the same as the ones in the bookstore. They cover all of the steps involved for several types of samba servers. For example, if you just run the distro's config utility, you might not know that you should have only one samba wins server. Or that XP Home edition can't join a domain.

Samba swat is a convenient way of configuring your samba server.

two ways to setup your network adapter:

1- The GUI Way: to setup your ipaddress from GUI/GNOME, go to system menu > administration > network ... choose your network adapter and configure.

2- The Shell Way: to to applications menu > Accessories > terminal
type the following in the shell:
this command will let you configure your network adapter. it lets you put the ipaddress, subnet mask and gateway...

i also want to emphasis that i'm not against using GUI for adminstration. but even windows administrators will need to do some things from command line. with linux the shell is a lot more powerfull and more fun. when you master it you'll find yourself doing more and more things from the shell.

look at the link below: http://www.linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php

post more questions if you have any.

Thanks you for that link... It's exactly what I need to start.

Thanks so much for your help everyone!