I am trying to setup a "shared drive" for our lab on a university campus. I installed Debian on a spare PC we have here and the "clients" are all using Windows 7 Professional.
Ideally, they all want to be able to see a new drive on their computers, called "shared" for example, and they can read/write save/edit files etc on it just like if it was their C drive.
I thought about setting up an NFS on it but Windows 7 professional does NOT come with the "Services for Unix NFS" that would be required to mount an NFS drive. I would have to upgrade them all to Windows 7 Enterprise (out of the question).
So I'm wondering whether there is some other way to setup an NFS that I could connect to on Windows 7 Professional, or if I can just setup a Samba share. Will the Samba share essentially provide me with the same thing that is required?