fuse-sshfs; was Re: Is there a NFS alternative?

Daniel Yek dyek at real.com
Mon Feb 12 03:24:16 UTC 2007


At 05:52 AM 2/11/2007, Till Maas wrote:
>On Thursday 08 February 2007 01:02, Daniel Yek wrote:
>
> > I am hoping for a secure solution to mount directories "shared out" from my
> > other computer located remotely over the Internet. So that I can edit
> > source files and execute programs "locally" and compile remotely (a much
> > faster machine).
>
> > Is NFS(4) still the best (and easiest-to-use?) solution?
>
>As someone else suggested, try fuse-sshfs, with
>
>sshfs remotehosts: /mnt/remotehome
>
>you can mount your remote home directory to /mnt/remotehome and with
>
>fusermount -u /mnt/remotehome
>
>you can umount it. Nothing more than a unprivileged ssh account on the remote
>machine and fuse-sshfs on the local machine and a user in the fuse group is
>required.
>
>Regards,
>Till

I have been using fuse-sshfs for a few days now. It is something good to 
know and I'm still using it, but it fell short in 2 aspects so far:

1. While saving over the Internet each time I habitually save a text file 
isn't too bad, executing a program in the fuse-sshfs mounted directory is 
unbearable. It took my program a warping 4 minutes to "download" and 
execute. Worst, everytime the program reload a DSO file, the DSO file is 
"downloaded" over the Internet again (and again.)

Caching is very much inadequate.

I can use rsync over a small directory hierarchy to workaround this problem 
though (still not exactly convenient enough to be transparent).


2. Whenever I lose my ssh connection due to some timeout problem, it was 
such a hassle to quit all text editors (so that no process has a handle to 
a fuse-sshfs mounted subdirectory, I think,) and remount the directory. 
Remounting shouldn't require unmounting or quiting text editors.

Thanks for all feedback. They are very useful.


-- 
Daniel Yek




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