SSHFS - remote file system mounts via SSH and FUSE

While installing a test copy of Ubuntu on a server the other day I noticed a package called SSHFS being installed which struck me as a "good idea"

I do almost 100% of my system administration on remote systems (even if only in the next room or downstairs) via ssh - and with my work doing the video grabbing of various nest-cams and such for Hancock Wildlife Foundation I end up moving fairly large amounts of video files around from server to server to archive, etc. Mostly I use rsync and scp - but the thought of being able to use such simple tools as "mv" to move a file from one server to another over a secure link (of course you can do this with NFS but mostly that's not secure) made me stop and take notice.

Just trying to keep files from being duplicated on machines is one of the hardest parts. We accumulate them on systems that tend to have limited disk space - then after a day or two - move them to archive servers that are not nearly as well connected to the net (lower speed links) but which have massive amounts of storage on them. To date this has been pretty much a manual process - albeit one that doesn't take much time for me to do, but takes quite a bit of time once set to doing it - so I have to check every day or two - at least before the main systems run out of space.

And of course there have been times when I've missed checking and the systems have run out of space :(

So... sshfs looks very interesting!

A quick Google for sshfs took me to fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

It appears that the latest kernels, including the ones I have on my workstations, already have the fuse kernel module in them. I have a /dev/fuse device file already for instance.

I downloaded the fuse source from the handy link provided, then thought "hmmm... if the fuse kernel mod is there, maybe fuse is available via YUM" and lo and behold it was!

"yum install fuse" works as advertised

so I downloaded the sshfs code and ran configure. It was looking for some fuse modules so I returned to yum.

"yum install fuse-devel" got me two more modules and sshfs was happy!

after "./configure ; make ; make install" I now have /usr/local/bin/sshfs and a  module (sshnodelay.so) in /usr/local/lib

The docs suggest not running this as root. Now I have to admit that I tend to do everything as root on my machines, but then I've already gone through the "oops" stage of Unix/Linux system admin and both keep lots of backups and know how to re-install/restore - and have not had to do so in quite a number of years (over 15). You may want to take their suggestion.

I also have a number of "blank password" ssh keys set up to allow unattended backups between various machines. They're protected in other ways too so not much of a security hole. Again, you may not want to do this with your systems unless you really know what you are doing with firewalls and such.

Hey - this is great! Another arrow in the admin quiver.