The Samba service

Samba is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol, which is mostly used on computers running Microsoft Windows. It is basically a way of allowing a Windows computer to connect to Linux systems and access their shared files or printers. It is not created by Windows and was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell.

If you want to share media from Linux with other Windows computers on your network, Samba is the best software option.

Installing and configuring Samba

You need to install Samba and a common library that is used by Samba using the following command line:

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin 

You can then navigate to /etc/samba and edit the smb.conf file. On a private network for personal use, you may skip any step that requires the use of passwords to mount network shares. In an exposed or production environment, always use authentication.

If you do not like to put security on internal network shares, then this is perfectly safe. Since these files...