Connecting raspberry pi folder to Windows as a Network Device using Samba.

First, you need to install samba into your raspberry pi.
After doing that, you run

I do this every time I work with Linux or raspberry pi, and I advise you to do it too.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Next, let’s get samba.

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

Prepare the shared directory/folder

Now we need to define the folder/directory we are going to use, this will be the folder that PC A and B will have access to.

The folder can be located anywhere, even in an external folder. the SDcard I was using died a few days after and because I set the folder in a thumb drive I didn’t last the information, I just need it to bake another SDCard install samba and I was up and running.

mkdir /home/pi/shared

Access configuration
The next step is to modify the file smb.conf to let samba knows where the folder to share is and how to handle the access.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

at the end of the file add:

[pimyshare]
path = /home/pi/shared
writeable=Yes
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=no

[pimyshare] the text in brackets defines the point where we will access the folder itself, for example //raspberrypi/pimyshare. this will be important later when we configure PC a and B to access the folder.
path is the path to the directory we are going to share.
writeable set as yes allow the user to write in the folder (we need this to add new files to the folder).
create mask and directory mask define the permission for both folder and files, it is set as 07770777 users are allowed to read, write and execute (some cases will be better to avoid the execution for security reasons).
public set to no it will require a valid user to grant access to the folder.

Save the document in this case Ctrl + X and Y .

Set a user for the samba share
To control the access to this folder, I add a user and a password.

With this command we can set the password, the user will be pi

sudo smbpasswd -a pi

Restart the server.

sudo systemctl restart smbd

If we need to get the hostname, we can obtain it with hostname -I

Connect to the Samba server

The final step is to configure access to the shared directory.

Windows

File Explorer > Computer > Map network drive

Now we need to input the name of the host or the IP address followed by the name of the folder ( name in brackets in the configuration file)

The system will ask you for the user and password, as explained in a previous step the user is “pi” and the password was the one defined before.