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There are a couple relatively easy ways to mount remote directories
on your local Linux box without needing to change anything on the
server side. The result is that the files appear to be local and can
be worked with as if they were local (e.g., opening files, copying,
etc.). Both of these approaches send the files through ssh, so everything
is secure and as long as the server accepts ssh sessions, this should
work with any UNIX/Linux server.
- Install the sshfs package.
Then just create a local directory; this will serve as the mount point
for the remote filesystem. Finally, as the user, rather than root,
do the following, where mountpoint is the local directory
you created.
>sshfs hostname: mountpoint
I've noticed a few minor problems when using sshfs, but the advantages
have outweighed the disadvantages. There are occasionally issues with
using mv rather than cp, and sometimes things freeze.
Also, on my Fedora 5 machine, I've needed to invoke the following
command before invoking sshfs:
>su -c 'mknod -m 666 /dev/fuse c 10 229; chmod guo+rw /dev/fuse'
To unmount the filesystem, just do
>fusermount -u mountpoint
- Use the shfs package, which provides shfsmount and
shfsumount binaries for mounting and unmounting directories.
These binaries tunnel through ssh so that everything is completely
secure, removing the need for SAMBA or something similar to be running
on the file server/remote machine. In my Linux Redhat 9 installation,
it took some monkeying to get shfs to install properly. First, shfs
needs to work with the current version of the kernel, so it requires
that the kernel-source package for the current kernel be installed.
I also needed to make a couple changes to the Makefile when
installing the package, namely defining KERNEL=$(uname -r)
and KERNEL_SOURCES=${ROOT}/usr/src/linux-2.4.
You will also need to chmod 4555 /usr/bin/shfs{u}mount
so that individual users can access the binaries.
If you update your kernel, you'll need to reinstall shfs, along the
following lines:
>cd /opt/shfs-0.35
>make clean # this may not be necessary
>make # this may not be necessary
>make install
>chmod 4555 /usr/bin/shfs{u}mount
Keywords: remote mounting, ssh, tunneling
Last modified: 12/28/07 (sshfs), 4/2/06 (shfs)
Next: Getting information
Up: Linux/UNIX
Previous: File locations
Chris Paciorek
2012-01-21