On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 6:31 AM, Wayne Davis <waydavis@centurylink.net> wrote:

Ive wanted to share NTFS and EXT4 directories amongst several machines.

If the Win 7 machines are either Ultimate or Enterprise edition, then all you need is NFS to share files among all the systems. If the Win 7 systems are anything less than those two variants, then you'll need to have Samba installed. If you need to use Samba, then it's server component needs to be configured and running on each Linux machine that needs to share their file structure to the Windows systems.

Most modern Linux distros have NFS available out of the box for both client and server format (after a brief configuration). You'll need NFS server on each machine that has directories that need shared, and configure the /etc/fstab file for each machine that will mount NFS shares into their file system.

My recommendation is to have one Linux machine be the "file server" and have it run both NFS and Samba Servers and then the other systems all mount it's file structure and keep as much storage on that file server. Obviously that recommendation is only good if you've got the spare space on the file server.