sshfs

sshfs is primarily the work of Miklos Szeredi, a Linux hacker from Budapest who is better-known as the creator of FUSE, the Filesystem in USErspace framework that makes sshfs possible. Szeredi was already working on FUSE when he discovered Florin Malita's similar project named LUFS and its SSHFS filesystem.

Szeredi liked the idea of an SSH-protected filesystem enough that he wrote a LUFS wrapper to allow him to use Malita's SSHFS in FUSE. Unhappy with the performance and lack of multi-threading, though, he eventually decided to implement his own sshfs native to FUSE.

The FUSE library and kernel module -- which joined the official Linux kernel in 2.6.14 -- enable non-root users and unprivileged programs to create and mount filesystems entirely in user space. This has led to a flurry of FUSE-based projects, providing filesystem interfaces to everything from USB-attached digital cameras to remote Gmail accounts.

Preparation

But sshfs is one of the more straightforward FUSE filesystems, and thus a good place to begin for those new to FUSE. To get started, make sure that you have FUSE installed and working on your local machine. If your distribution is up-to-date, a binary package may be available to you already.

If not, you can download the source code for libfuse and the kernel module from the project's SourceForge page. Once it's installed, no further configuration is required, but you must issue a modprobe fuse command to make sure that the FUSE kernel module is loaded. You may also want to add yourself to the fuse group so you can work with FUSE without having to be root.

Next, download the sshfs source. Extract it and run ./configure and make && make install. sshfs utilizes OpenSSH's sftp package, so make sure that you have it installed on your local machine too.

You can connect to any other machine reachable via ssh; no special setup is required on the remote host. sshfs supports both SSH1 and SSH2 protocols, defaulting (as do most other tools) to SSH2. If you haven't used ssh before, you will need to generate a key pair and perform some basic ssh configuration. See the tutorials at OpenSSH.com for more help.

Connection

The general form for mounting an sshfs filesystem is sshfs username@remote_hostname:directory local_mount_point -- where username is the username of your account on the remote host. If it is the same as your local username, you may safely omit it and the @ sign.

If you do not specify a directory on the remote host, the user account's home directory is assumed -- but you must not omit the trailing colon in this case (e.g., sshfs [email protected]: ~/webstuff).

Once the remote directory is mounted, it behaves like any other local filesystem, visible to all scripts and applications, but over an end-to-end encrypted channel. You can browse and drag-and-drop files with Nautilus or Konqueror, edit files as if they were local, even work with a CVS repository.

When you are done working, the command fusermount -u local_mount_point unmounts the filesystem and tears down the connection.

If you intend to make regular use of an sshfs filesystem, you can add it to /etc/fstab and have it mounted automatically. Before doing this, however, make sure that the FUSE kernel module is loaded at startup time by adding it to /etc/modules.

Observation

Read and write performance is fast with sshfs. To get a feel for the system, I connected to an off-site backup server over my cable modem and tried to work my usual routine to compare real-world performance. I found no discernible time difference between commands acting on the remote system and local files. By contrast, NFS mounts frequently incur a noticeable lag, and WebDAV is slower than molasses.

Of course, two of the advantages to WebDAV are the collaborative editing of documents and revision tracking, which sshfs is not designed for. On the other hand, sshfs is far superior to scp because the entire command-line toolset operates on it.

For moving files from one machine to another, scp does a fine job -- but when it comes to searching, batch operations, cron jobs, or editing in place, sshfs wins hands down. As Szeredi told me, the convenience of filename auto-completion alone makes the whole system worthwhile.

sshfs reached version 1.0 last January. The current 1.3 release is essentially feature-complete, though Szeredi says there is still some work to be done. Certain command-line tools (such as df) do not work properly due to shortcomings in the OpenSSH implementation of sftp. To work around these holes, sshfs has to estimate disk usage and free space, which could complicate its usage for some tasks.

But even when it is completed, Szeredi points out that sshfs will not replace high-end systems like NFS or VPNs. It is intended only to provide fast, convenient access to remote directories, and do so securely, and with no configuration required on the remote host.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 190313 : How to install SSHFS on CentOS 7 ( How to install SSHFS on CentOS 7, )
• 190313 : Mount a remote file system through ssh Using sshfs -- Debian Admin ( Mount a remote file system through ssh Using sshfs -- Debian Admin, )

Old News ;-)

How to install SSHFS on CentOS 7

1. Install SSHFS with yum
2. Install SSHFS from source
3. Mount a remote folder with SSHFS
4. Unmount a remote folder

SSHFS is a handy tool to share files securely. It is a filesystem based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol. As all Linux servers have already SSH installed, its very easy to configure and can be used to share files between two or more servers or desktops. You just have to mount the file system and it works like a charm. The idea of sshfs was taken from the SSHFS filesystem distributed with LUFS, which I found very useful. In this tutorial we will see how to install SSHFS with from the CentOS repository with the yum command and also how to compile it from source.

Install SSHFS with yum

Use the following command to install the SSHFS package with yum:

 yum install sshfs 

When you installed the package with yum, proceed with the chapter "Mount a remote folder with SSHFS".

... ... ...

Mount a remote folder with SSHFS

Now I will mount this folder from remote server. In my case the remote server IP is 192.168.0.10:

 sshfs [email protected]:/ /var/mnt/ 

Now we will check that is this folder mounted on the other side or not ?

One important thing that should be noted here is that this is temporary mount that will be automatically unmouted when you restart the server. If you want a persistent mount then you should add the mount in /etc/fstab or add the mound command into the /etc/rc.local file which gets run at boot.

Unmount a remote folder

You can unmount the folder by using the following command on your server

 umount /var/tmp 

From the above tutorial you have successfully installed and configured SSHFS on your server and you can easily mount and unmount folders and share files remotely with your friends on the same network or over the internet. Learn and Enjoy !

Mount a remote file system through ssh Using sshfs -- Debian Admin

If you want to access a remote file system through ssh you need to install sshfs.sshfs is a filesystem client based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol. Since most SSH servers already support this protocol it is very easy to set up: i.e. on the server side there's nothing to do. On the client side mounting the file system is as easy as logging into the server with ssh.

sshfs Features

• Based on FUSE (the best userspace filesystem framework for linux)

• Multithreading: more than one request can be on it's way to the server

• Allowing large reads (max 64k)

• Caching directory contents

• sshfs runs entirely in user space. A user using sshfs does not need to deal with the root account of the remote machine. In the case of NFS, Samba etc., the admin of the remote machine has to grant access to those who will be using the services.

Install SSHFS in Debian

#apt-get install fuse-utils sshfs

Next, let's make sure the following condition is met. In the local system, type (as root)

# modprobe fuse

This will load the FUSE kernel module. Besides SSHFS, the FUSE module allows to do lots of other nifty tricks with file systems, such as the BitTorrent file system, the Bluetooth file system, the User-level versioning file system, the CryptoFS, the Compressed read-only file system and many others.

Now you need to make sure you have installed ssh in your debian server using the following command

# apt-get install ssh

Using SSHFS

SSHFS is very simple to use. The following command

$ sshfs user@host: mountpoint

This will mount the home directory of the user@host account into the local directory named mountpoint. That's as easy as it gets. (Of course, the mountpoint directory must already exist and have the appropriate permissions).

Example

create the mount point

#mkdir /mnt/remote

#chown [user-name]:[group-name] /mnt/remote/

Add yourself to the fuse group

adduser [your-user] fuse

switch to your user and mount the remote filesystem.

sshfs [email protected]:/remote/directory /mnt/remote/

If you want to mount a directory other than the home directory, you can specify it after the colon. Actually, a generic sshfs command looks like this:

$ sshfs [user@]host:[dir] mountpoint [options]

Unmount Your Directory

If you want to unmount your directory use the following command

fusermount -u mountpoint

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Last modified: March 12, 2019