File Sensor on Remote Host folder...instead of HA Host folders

So, I’m using the file sensor to count the number of files in /config/www/pdf/.

My document scanner scans directly to this folder, and the purpose is to act as an “inbox” with an inbox count. This is working.

What I’m interested in doing is counting the contents of ANY folder on ANY of my host systems. HA is running in a VM on Proxmox, and I feel like I’m a slave to scanning into the HA SMB shares in order to do anything with them with the sensor integrations.

We have an extensive library of documents, images, etc., on a different host, and I would like to be able to trigger automations when new files are added or removed from THOSE systems.

I know that I can whitelist folders, but I think that only applies to the HA host…and not any external host running Samba.

Is there a way to achieve this?

Mount the remote file system to a whitelisted local folder.

?? No idea how to do that. Threads are divided on the topic and it seems very confusing.