Late to the part as usual. However, this has to be the coolest thing since sliced bread and it beats Samba in so many ways I can barely contain myself. The last couple of weeks have seen me become a bit of a SSH junkie, I’ve been running OpenSSH for well over a year but never really leveraged it to do more than shell into the server to check system mail and do general maintenance but after my successful PuTTY and TightVNC experiment I figure it was worth checking out what else I can do with it.
Michuk posted an article over at jakilinux.org that outlined some of the basics, like remote applications using X forwarding, but it was the chunk on SSHFS that really tickled my fancy. Samba shares are nice but brutally slow for copying files so most of the time I rely on SCP but that can be tedious, in my limited opinion, if you are looking for patterns or moving large amounts of scattered data. Enter SSHFS which allows you to mount remote folders via SSH and have all the security and speed.
My goal was to have my music available to Beep Media Player, which didn’t recognize Samba shares, and to potentially speed up Rhythmbox’s cataloging which is brutally slow over Samba. Needless to say it is stupid simple. Check it out:
Execute the following commands:
Add fuse to the list, save and close.
Add yourself to the fuse group under System–> Administration–> Users and Groups.
Logout and back in.
Create a mountpoint and take ownership of it:
Here’s the magic:
When you are all done don’t forget to clean up after yourself:
Super easy, super simple, fast, and secure. Here are a couple of more resources that I used as references when doing this: Ubuntu Forums HOWTO, and Ubuntu.wordpress.com.
Yeah, my thought exactly when I discovered sshfs and FUSE. Amazingly useful. There are lots of other interesting modules for FUSE, but sshfs is the only one I’ve used with any regularity so far. It actually replaces higher-level schemes like Emacs TRAMP and KDE FISH. Only problem is I do a lot of work on FreeBSD 4 systems and FUSE is available for FreeBSD 6 but hasn’t been backported to FreeBSD 4 (and probably never will). One of these days I also want to have a look at libferris which sounded very interesting from a magazine article that I read, but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
Oooo, that libferris stuff looks cool, something I’ll definitely have to look into. On the Fuse front CopyFS, BlogFS, and Flickrfs all certainly look enticing. So many things to play with!
Any windows clients for sshfs (i’m assuming fuse is the linux client? Haven’t heard much about fuse, though i was using it the other day without knowing anything about it.). Also automounting that share? Does fstab understand sshfs?
I didn’t have much success but the fstab entry should read:
sshfs#my-remote-user@my-remote-host:/home/my-remote-user /my-local-filesystem/remotefs fuse defaults 0 0
This article talks about needing mount.fuse in /sbin and sure enough it is MIA so that might be the problem. Hopefully it will get addressed.
I ended up making a mount and unmount bash script to toggle it. Inelegant for sure but since I use a host file for my domain when behind the firewall I’d like to exert a little more control than fstab allows. You could do the same and add it to your start up events. Color me n00b.
I didn’t find any windows clients for it and my first thought was maybe Cygwin but that was quickly dashed. I’m thinking that for Windows to Linux might be WebDAV or SFTP which can be mounted as drive letters in Windows.