How can I share a network folder to a Windows or Linux PC

[Peter Gamma]

wibble commented in one of his answers to my questions in this forum, that it is easier to have a network between a Linux PC and a PinePhone than a network with a PinePhone and a Winows PC. In Ubuntu, it is easily possible to share a network folder with another PC. How can I share a PinePhone folder as a network shared folder for instance to a Ubuntu PC over for instance the USB-c dock connected over ethernet cable to the Ubuntu PC?

[jakfish]

I've always had trouble getting my Linux machines to work with a shared Windows folder. My workaround, which works with all my devices, is to set up Win as a ftp server and just have it serve its public folder. Both Thunar and PCMANFAM play nice with ftp servers on home network, and I'm sure many other file managers will do the same.

There are many how-tos about setting up ftp server. The real rub is your ISP. You need a static ip address for ftp. Some ISPs keep changing your given static address (xfinity in the US, for example), so you have to update--perhaps monthly--your static address. Other ISPs don't care and let you use the same static address for years.

[KC9UDX]

I use Samba between my Android phone and a NetBSD server. It should be even easier to do that with a Pinephone. I only use it because it is faster than FTP.

There is always NFS.

I would expect the ISP shouldn't come into play for a local network. Back when (~1997), I ran a public webserver from a dynamic IP, I would have the server (running Amiga 3.1) email me the new IP address whenever it changed. Then I would manually update the domain's IP on the web.

[jakfish]

I think a shifting static address flummoxes the basic ftp server software of Win10-11 since the address has to be entered into ftp settings.. Third-party ftp apps may be more forgiving. Verizon--knock on wood--lets me keep my static address; xfinity changed it every month, a minor hassle b/c every linux machine had to be updated as well.

[Kevin Kofler]

IMHO, by far the easiest way to transfer data from/to the PinePhone is SFTP, see https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13861&pid=115605#pid115605. On Windows, you can use WinSCP as a client. On GNU/Linux, while most file managers support SFTP directly, you can also use FUSE-based solutions such as fuse-sshfs, kio-fuse, or the gvfs FUSE integration, to make the remote SFTP directory look like a normal directory (similarly to how SMB shares work). This may or may not be possible on Windows too.

[wibble]

If you've got ssh access (which I regard as a must, but not everyone seems to) then in kde you can just use fish://pinephone_username@your_pinephone/some/path in file management tools or dialogs to access it - replace username, pinephone name or address and path as required. Kio uses ssh to do all the directory listing and file transfer in the background with nothing more to configure. I gather gnome's gvfs doesn't support FISH so probably needs sshfs to do the job via fuse. There's also kdeconnect - gsconnect shares the same protocol if you're using gnome. Not sure on current status of gsconnect with phosh - it used not to work so you had to use kdeconnnect instead. It worked when I tried it but that's a long time back now.

[Kevin Kofler]

I don't see a good reason to use fish:// over sftp://. fish:// is a hack that uses SSH without SFTP to do file transfers. SFTP is the SSH subprotocol actually designed for file transfers. The only time fish:// is useful is if the server has SFTP disabled for some reason or if it is broken. Neither should be the case on your PinePhone. And sftp:// is supported out of the box by both KDE and GNOME applications.