Shared resource

In computing, a shared resource, or network share, is a computer resource made available from one host to other hosts on a computer network. It is a device or piece of information on a computer that can be remotely accessed from another computer transparently as if it were a resource in the local machine. Network sharing is made possible by inter-process communication over the network. Some examples of shareable resources are computer programs, data, storage devices, and printers. E.g. shared file access (also known as disk sharing and folder sharing), shared printer access, shared scanner access, etc. The shared resource is called a shared disk, shared folder or shared document The term traditionally means shared file access, especially in the context of operating systems and LAN and Intranet services, for example in Microsoft Windows documentation. Though, as BitTorrent and similar applications became available in the early 2000s, the term file sharing increasingly has become associated with over the Internet. Shared file and printer access require an operating system on the client that supports access to resources on a server, an operating system on the server that supports access to its resources from a client, and an application layer (in the four or five layer TCP/IP reference model) file sharing protocol and transport layer protocol to provide that shared access. Modern operating systems for personal computers include s that support file sharing, while hand-held computing devices sometimes require additional software for shared file access. The most common such file systems and protocols are: The "primary operating system" is the operating system on which the file sharing protocol in question is most commonly used. On Microsoft Windows, a network share is provided by the Windows network component "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks", using Microsoft's SMB (Server Message Block) protocol. Other operating systems might also implement that protocol; for example, Samba is an SMB server running on Unix-like operating systems and some other non-MS-DOS/non-Windows operating systems such as OpenVMS.