There are a lot of Linux servers out there, but the vast majority are hardened against "a few commands" to learn networking. Those that are not usually last about 6 minutes before they are "discovered", attacked, taken over and the operators taught a few hard lessons.
You best approach is to grab an old box out of the closet, load Red Hat or Suse on it, set up Apache and run the box as a web server on your system. Then move up to Samba and learn file servers.
Good Luck
