Copying different files to and from your home network

Now that your Raspberry Pi Zero is sitting comfortably on your home network, it can work as a central part of it and interact with the other computers using it. This will show you how to set up a file share on your Raspberry Pi that can interact with the computers on your home network.

Getting ready

You can either stay connected to your Zero over SSH, or you can open a terminal in your VNC viewer window-it's all up to you. Because it is rendering graphics, VNC will tend to be a more resource intensive and maybe a little more choppy than your SSH terminal; this recipe does not require any GUI tools to get working.

How to do it...

Samba is really the easiest way to set up a file share if you have Windows machines on your network. While Macs and Linux machines work with Network File Sharing (NFS) very easily, success with using this on Windows operating systems varies quite a bit. Most Home Edition versions of Windows unfortunately do not support acting as an NFS client, but nothing stops us from using Samba:

1. First, we will use apt-get to get Samba installed:

           sudo apt-get install samba
   

2. Once this is finished, we will set up a password to connect:

           sudo smbpasswd -a pi
   

3. Create a folder that we will use as a file share:

           mkdir /home/pi/share
   

4. Let's also make a test file while we're at it:

           touch /home/pi/share/helloNetwork.yes
   

5. Now we just need to tell the Samba service about this new share. Open the /etc/samba/smb.conf using your favorite editor:

           sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf
   

6. To the end of the file, add your share information:

           [share]
           path = /home/pi/share
           valid users = pi
           read only = no
   

7. Save the file, and then restart Samba:

           sudo service smbd restart
   

8. Once Samba restarts, it will pick up the new share you entered into the smb.conf file. You can check for errors by running this command:

           testparm
   

9. A truncated version of the expected output is displayed here:

           pi@rpz14101:~ $ testparm
           Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf
           Processing section "[homes]"
           Processing section "[printers]"
           Processing section "[print$]"
           Processing section "[share]"
           Loaded services file OK.
           Server role: ROLE_STANDALONE
   Press enter to see a dump of your service definitions
   ...
   [share]
    path = /home/pi/share
    valid users = pi
    read only = No
   

10. If there is anything wrong, this utility should tell you. Otherwise, you should see the new share you just created. If you want to connect from a Linux or Mac computer, the address will be in this format:

            smb://<IP_Address>/shareName
    

11. In my case, it is this:

            smb://192.168.2.42/share
    

    On a Windows machine, you connect to \\IP_Address\ShareName, as in \\192.168.2.42\share.

    A login prompt should appear; use the name and password you provided in smbpasswd:

    
12. If all went well, you should see the file you created earlier:
    

Now you can read and write into and out of that folder. This is a great way to copy a backup of files you've created on your Raspberry Pi Zero in case you decide you want to start with a fresh SD card. For future recipes where we will write programs and scripts, we will work in this directory so that it is easy to make a backup.