Share unlimited data on LAN for Windows

By Arpit Bhayani on June 04, 2015

Tags : public share windows directory apache

There are always times when you want to share data with your colleagues and friends. The data can be as huge as hundreds of GBs or as small as a 1KB text file. There are lots of ways you can achieve this; to name a few:

Use a USB Flash drive
Use a external hard drive
Put data onto some cloud storage

Each of the above has its own pros and cons. The use of USB Flash drive and External hard drive enables data transfer of files up to some limit i.e. it puts a constraint on the file size; plus in some organizations it is not allowed to carry some external storage with you. So you cannot always have the liberty of using external storage for file transfer. Using data storage on cloud is always a slower option; plus it is infeasible for larger files.

Considering above pros and cons we think if there exists any solution that can enable unlimited data transfer between two machine. The answer is "YES" and it can be accomplished using a simple HTTP Web Server.

You will need a simple and highly popular "Apache HTTP Server". Thats it!

Following changes are with respect to Apache HTTP Server 2.2.21 and should work just fine on any version of it.

You need to do the following:

Step 1: Open httpd.conf file present in the conf folder of the Apache installation location.

Stop the Apache server before editing the httpd.conf file.
You may require Administrator privileges to make changes in it.

Step 2: At the end of the file add following snippet

Alias /my_alias "F:/Pic"
<Directory "F:/Pic">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Entity	Description
my_alias	The alias with which you want to expose your shared folder.
F:/Pic	The folder location that is to be shared.

Please note the FORWARD_SLASH used in the path, should be as they are. Folder contents

Step 3: Restart the Apache Server from taskbar Taskbar Apache Icon

Step 4: Hit the URL http://localhost:80/my_alias
You will see something like this. This folder is now shared on LAN and anyone with your IP Address can access it. Browser View

You can thus share any number of folders you want; just add corresponding lines to httpd.conf.

If you liked the script then do share it ;)