Using fuse to mount a remote dir with sshfs

by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Aug 24, 2009 | Linux

Hi!

Today I’m writing about a little tool that is an enormous impact on  how to make a remote filesystem available to you as a local filesystem. You may be wondering, what’s the new? NFS does it, Samba does it, it’s true but if you don’t have a VPN and your away from your LAN or WAN a simple task like acceding a folder on a remote web server can be a pain.

The requirements on the host you need to access are:

1. SSH server running
2. User account

On the client side you’ll need:

1. FUSE (Filesystem on user space) – you may install it easily with YUM, Zipper,apt-get, or whatever manager you’r using.
2. sshfs – once again you can use your software manager or download it from http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html
3. On depending on the local mount point you may need root access.

Now before you start lets create a dir so you can have a local mount point:

mkdir $HOME/REMOTE

and the mount command:

sshfs your_user@remote_host.com:/home/youruser $HOME/REMOTE

to umount REMOTE:

fusermount -u REMOTE

And your done .

There are a lot of options to sshfs, write/read under others permissions, sync or async writes, buffers sizes and read ahead options if you want to know more about all the options (and they are a few dozens) just type:

sshfs -h

Cheers and see you next time

Pedro Oliveira