Network access to your HTPC box is another topic that is inevitable, but subject to personal preferences, mainly on subject which protocols to use. SSH seems as an obvious choice, but I've also wanted to provide anonymous access to HTPC storage for everyone inside my localnet, without the need for any authentication or user accounts on HTPC box. My final choice was Samba, although I was evaluating NFS for some time. Samba provides decent interoperability among most popular operating systems, allows anonymous access in so called SHARE security mode and I'm pretty satisfied with it. My smb.conf is available in download section. Just make sure that Samba is not visible from Internet if your HTPC has public IP address (configure hosts allow line in smb.conf), because lots of bots are performing constant brute force attacks and even if you configured security aspects correctly, they will take some of your resources away.
