Ubuntu – File sharing with Windows

An SSH server with SFTP service (which comes standard in most SSHD installs), it's also a platform independent solution.

The setup is easy:

sudo apt-get install ssh

should fill in any of the server-side gaps you'd need.

On your router, you'd want to map port 22 to the hosting machine, or you could reconfigure SSHD to listen on a different or additional port, and then forward that instead.

You might also have to modify that machine's firewall policy, if you are using one.

Also, bear in mind that if serving from your home connection, the speed will be limited to your home connection's upload speed. For music, that may not matter, but for video, it would probably choke.

In Nautilus, select File | Connect to Server ...

There are a lot of options to share a file-system over a network in unix/linux. Nautilus supports some of them: ssh, webdav, ftp, smb and others. Obviously, any of these solutions requires that the corresponding daemon is running on remote host.

NFS is unix native "standard" way to share a file-system in a lan but the time needed to configure and manage such a solution is not worth the result in a so simple network as yours. IMHO, ssh is the best solution in your environment.

Usually ssh is used to log on and to execute commands on a remote machine. The way you connect to the remote machine is not the way to share a file-system but the way to execute remote commands. If you want to mount a remote file system via ssh via command line, try something like: sshfs remoteusername@host:/home/remoteusername /home/localusername/somedir (or use nautilus wizard).