Linux Networking Tutorial: NFS data sharing

NFS and Samba are very similar. Both have a client and server application. Both allow a server to share files with clients. Both have clients and servers on almost every platform. The big difference is the Windows PCs have Samba-compatible clients and servers as part of their default network support and Windows requires third party software to support NFS. Conversely, UNIX systems usually come with and use NFS by default with Samba being used to provide file sharing with Windows PCs.