Hey guys I have a bit of nooby question. I’m not well versed in the inner workings of network architecture so I was wondering about something.

The machines on the network important to this discussion:

  1. TrueNAS Core server
  2. Linux server
  3. Windows desktop

I have directories from machines 1 and 2 mounted on 3 over SMB. The directory from machine 1 is also mounted on machine 2 over NFS. I copied some files from 1 to 2 but using windows explorer on machine 3. The question is what happens exactly?

Do the files go straight from 1 to 2 over the network switch or they first go from 1 to 3 and then to 2?

simplified diagram of the network

edit: added diagram