Here's a quick command line version based on this blog entry, but containing some steps that it doesn't cover. (I've done this twice in the past month or so, so I thought I'd share the joy)

SSHFS is an adaption of FUSE. FUSE, for those who don't know, allows filesystems to be implemented in user space instead of kernel space. So in essence, SSHFS allows you to mount a remote filesystem and access it as if it were local. It comes in handy for me when one of you machines has vpn access, or a source controlled directory and you want to use it on another machine without having to worry or mess with copying and merging. Obviously there is a slight performance hit, since any access to the mounted filesystem has to go over an encrypted line. I should/could probably use samba/nfs for my purposes, but this is a lot simpler than messing with smb.conf (and to be honest I've never looked into setting up nfs).

  • edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment this line deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper universe
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install sshfs
  • Create a mount point, here's what I used sudo mkdir /media/r52
  • Change the owner of the mount point sudo chown matt /media/r52/
  • Add yourself to the fuse group sudo adduser matt fuse
  • Log out at this point and re-login so that the group membership takes effect
  • I mount it like this sshfs -o allow_other r52:/home/matt /media/r52/ (the allow_other option allows other users access to this partition, and you have to add user_allow_other to the file /etc/fuse.conf (make sure there is a newline following it)
  • If /dev/fuse doesn't exist run this command sudo mknod -m 666 /dev/fuse c 10 229