Windows and Linux......playing together

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@KaraokeAmerica

I want to be able to access folders on a Pi for getting or modifying files from a windows computer.

That’s quite easy, just install the Samba Server from the MyOSMC - AppStore. Then the OSMC box becomes a Samba Server and can be accessed from Windows. While this will only give you restricted access to the OS files you should use SFTP to access those if needed.

@KaraokeAmerica

I want the ability to have my Linux clients write to shares on my window server for things like log files.

From my experience the most stable and flexible way for that is using autofs using SMB following this guide

Mounting network shares with autofs (alternative to fstab)

This how-to describes how to mount your network shares via autofs. Autofs should be as performant as fstab based mounting but has the advantage that your shares are mounted on demand which also should give you more reliability in case of network interuptions. First install the autofs package sudo apt-get install autofs If you already have mounted your shares already via fstab comment out that line in fstab and reboot. For this how-to we are going to use a directory for each server, if you wa…

@KaraokeAmerica

many terms thrown around like SMB, fstab etc.

Well you may can ignore learning most of them and just follow the HowTo’s but it might not be bad to google some of them:

SMB (Server Message Block) is a networking protocol mainly used natively by Microsoft for network file sharing. Samba is a free implementation using SMB to act as a server (e.g. on linux).

FSTAB (File Systems Table) is a fundamental part of Linux that tells the operating system which filesystems (Harddisk or Network) to mount (where and how). For long the fstab was a central part for this. In modern times where filesystems became more “flexible” (USB sticks, Network FS,…) there are also alternatives to the fstab like the autofs solution we explained above.