SSHFS is quite handy working on remote servers, when you need to copy files across systems. SCP is good, SSHFS is sometimes better.
What is SSHFS?
Referencing the man page, SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell (SSH) login on the remote machine.
The real-life benefit of SSHFS is that the end user can seamlessly interact with remote files being securely served over SSH just as if they were local files on his computer. On the remote machine the SFTP subsystem of SSH is used.
Installation
# apt-get update && apt-get install sshfs fuse
Configuration
Load fuse kernel module:
# modprobe fuse
By default, our regular user, sandy, is not a member of the fuse group:
# grep fuse /etc/group fuse:x:109:
Add sandy to the supplementary fuse group:
# usermod -aG fuse sandy
Login:
# su -l sandy
Create a mountpoint to be used to mount a remote filesystem:
$ mkdir ~/temp
In the following example, we’re going to mount the entire root filesystem. You can mount specific remote directories of your choice, like /home or /tmp.
Mount the remote root filesystem:
$ sshfs [email protected]:/ ~/temp -C -p 12
Sandy is both a regular user on the local system as well as a regular user on the remote system. Parameters:
- -C : enables data compression on SSH link.
- -p : custom port to use for SSH connection.
The df output below shows how the mounted filesystem should look like:
$ df -hT | egrep 'File|temp' Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on [email protected]:/ fuse.sshfs 35G 6.2G 28G 19% /home/sandy/temp
To unmount the filesystem, do:
$ fusermount -u ~/temp