If you’re a heavy ssh user, you already know about scp and rsync+ssh, but even that gets tedious when you’re using the same remote location a lot.

A solution to this is KDE’s fish:// kioslave, which lets you browse the remote path in konqueror much like you do any other. The drawback is that it’s not an actual filesystem, so if you open a video, you’ll have to wait before konqueror copies the whole file to a temporary local path before it will open it. (The same goes for smb:// samba shares, and probably all kioslaves.)

I’ve been using fish:// a lot, but lately it’s become very flaky on me, and I don’t know why, because the terse error messages don’t explain anything. But I also miss how it’s less convenient than nfs, which *is* a real filesystem (albeit one that is a pita to configure properly).

But there is another option. (Oh who am I kidding? This is linux, there are probably hundreds of options. ) If you have a remote location you need to access a lot, you could try sshfs. As the name implies, the protocol is still ssh (so the traffic is encrypted), but the interface is that of a filesystem. And it’s based on fuse (the user level filesystem layer), so no messing with the kernel necessary.

Here’s what you do

emerge sshfs-fuse
echo “fuse” >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
modprobe fuse

That should make sure the fuse module is loaded on boot. Now to mount and unmount a remote path:

sshfs host:/path /mount/point
fusermount -u /mount/point

Or, to make it even easier.. save this in /usr/local/bin.

MOUNT_POINT=/mount/point
HOST=host
MOUNT_PATH=/path/on/host
 
if [ ! -d $MOUNT_POINT ]; then
	echo "mount point $MOUNT_POINT missing"; exit 1
fi
 
if mount | grep $MOUNT_POINT; then
	echo "umounting..."
	fusermount -u $MOUNT_POINT
else
	echo "mounting..."
	sshfs -C -o transform_symlinks -o Cipher="blowfish" $HOST:$MOUNT_PATH $MOUNT_POINT
fi

Download this code: sshfs_mount