October 01, 2005
sshfs

Nerd document follows.

sshfs is pretty interesting. It allows you, as a normal user, to mount a remote filesystem using ssh. For example, I can make my okcomputer home directory show up locally.

tim@localhost:~$ mkdir okcomputer
tim@localhost:~$ sshfs antiflux.org:/home/tim okcomputer

I can also do the opposite: mount my local file system on a remote computer. This is a bit trickier because my local computer is behind a NAT firewall and I don't feel like editing the NAT configuration just for this. The answer: SSH tunnels!

tim@localhost:~:$ ssh -R 2222:localhost:22 remote.foo.com
[ password exchange, login stuff ]
tim@remote:~$ sshfs -p 2222 localhost:2222 /path/to/mountpoint

By default, the sshfs mount is only readable by the user who mounts it. Even root is blocked from reading it. The computer mounting a filesystem via sshfs needs to load the fuse kernel module, but nothing special is required on the other end - just an SSH server.

Posted by tim at October 01, 2005 10:58 AM
Comments

Holy crap, that's sweet! Tons of places don't allow FTP access any more, and Emacs can't deal with SFTP/SCP properly. Now I can just mount them and work on them locally!

There goes one more reason to buy a Powerbook.

Posted by: Tudor on October 3, 2005 04:10 PM
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