How to open a remote directory in PHP?

Question

PHP

At the enterprise there is a network, on computers of users the virtual disk is connected. There is a server (Ubuntu + Apache + PHP) from which one of the sections of the corporate portal works. From this server there is a need to access a folder on a shared network drive, get a directory of files and process them.
The essence of the issue, the folder is visible from the browser ( file://192.168.100.90/fs/inv/ - the directory opens), visible from Windows ( "Win" + "R" => \\192.168.100.90\fs\inv => opens folder ), but it fails from PHP:

$dir = "\\\\192.168.100.90\\fs\\inv";  
$catalog = opendir($dir);

PHP Warning – yii\base\ErrorException
opendir(\\192.168.100.90\fs\inv): failed to open dir: No such file or directory

$dir = "file://192.168.100.90/fs/inv/";  
$catalog = opendir($dir);

PHP Warning – yii\base\ErrorException
opendir(): remote host file access not supported, file://192.168.100.90/fs/inv/

I read that it is easier to mount a remote folder in Ubuntu and read from it locally, but according to the words, this is not very reliable.
Are there any other options?

Answer 1

You can mount it, you can use some kind of SMB client , but it would be better to think hard about how you got into this situation, and whether it is worth tweaking the architecture of the entire system a little.