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:
- SSH server running
- User account
On the client side you’ll need:
- FUSE (Filesystem on user space) – you may install it easily with YUM, Zipper,apt-get, or whatever manager you’r using.
- sshfs – once again you can use your software manager or download it from http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html
- 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
Pedro, I liked the tool I did not known it.
Do You have some comments about performance, or where can I obtain some info at respect.
thanks
Hi Mario,
About the performance of sshfs it’s similar to the one of scp, usually I use it only to help me maintain my systems, but in the end it’s not as fast as NFS or SMB, but the usage makes it really helpfull. There is a little overhead with the encriptation and a bigger one if you use compression, but you’ll gain speed on slower links. If you are using sshfs with anything equal or above 100MB/s I recomend turning compression off. With the latest processors you won’t notice much processor usage. But it’s still a bit slower than NFS or SMB.
Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira