File sharing via sshfs / FUSE

[cellularmitosis]

I've seen a few file-sharing related posts recently and this reminded me of the FUSE project (file systems in user-space) and one of its companions: sshfs.

sshfs allows you to "mount" a directory from any machine to which you have ssh access, so that all of the remote files show up directly in Finder. Very convenient!

While scp and rsync are options which work "out of the box" (to other Mac and Linux boxes), they aren't really suitable for folks who aren't comfortable with the terminal. sshfs is a way to get the benefits of scp / rsync while being as familiar as Finder.

So this morning I took a look at the state of sshfs on Tiger and Leopard and tried it out on a few of my machines.

The FUSE kernel extension

FUSE is a kernel extension. It is a general interface which allows you to mount all sorts of custom filesystems, one of which is sshfs. Note that FUSE is just the interface, it doesn't actually implement any of the filesystems.

For Tiger, the most recent FUSE implementation seems to be MacFUSE 2.0.3.2 from https://code.google.com/archive/p/macfuse/downloads

• non-https link: http://leopard.sh/dist/orig/MacFUSE-2.0.3.2.dmg

For Leopard, the most recent FUSE implementation seems to be osxfuse 3.11.2 from https://osxfuse.github.io/archive.html

• non-https link: http://leopard.sh/dist/orig/osxfuse-3.11.2.dmg

However, for Leopard, either FUSE layer seems to work.


The sshfs filesystem

sshfs is a filesystem implementation for FUSE which allows you to locally mount any directory from a remote machine to which you have ssh access.

For Tiger, the latest sshfs seems to be sshfs 1.0.0 from https://code.google.com/archive/p/macfuse/downloads.

• non-https link: http://leopard.sh/dist/orig/sshfs-1.0.0.dmg

This is actually a GUI application which pops up a little dialog to supply the mount parameters. Nifty.

Here, I'm looking at the Downloads folder from the machine "flouride":

When listing a particularly large directory, I ran into a few of these pop-ups. After clicking "Keep Trying" a few times, it worked as expected.

For Leopard, the 1.0.0 GUI application surprisingly doesn't seem to work (it always crashes when you try to mount). So instead you can use sshfs 2.5.0 from https://osxfuse.github.io/archive.html.

• non-https link: http://leopard.sh/dist/orig/sshfs-2.5.0.pkg

However, this is a command-line program. You'd use it like this: here, I'm mounting /Users/cell from user "cell" on machine "flouride":

mkdir -p ~/sshfs/flouride
sshfs cell@flouride:/Users/cell ~/sshfs/flouride

and then umount via:

umount ~/sshfs/flouride

Note: I have local DNS set up on my network. Your actual command may look more like this:

sshfs cell@192.168.1.12:/Users/cell ~/sshfs/flouride

Note: You can find out your IP address using 'ifconfig':

$ ifconfig            
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
    inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
    inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
    inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
gif0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1280
stf0: flags=0<> mtu 1280
en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    inet6 fe80::203:93ff:fe4f:1ac8%en0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4
    inet 192.168.1.80 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
    ether 00:03:93:4f:1a:c8
    media: autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>) status: active
    supported media: none autoselect 10baseT/UTP <half-duplex> 10baseT/UTP <full-duplex> 10baseT/UTP <full-duplex,hw-loopback> 100baseTX <half-duplex> 100baseTX <full-duplex> 100baseTX <full-duplex,hw-loopback>
fw0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 2030
    lladdr 00:03:93:ff:fe:4f:1a:c8
    media: autoselect <full-duplex> status: inactive
    supported media: autoselect <full-duplex>

 

[doctor_dog]

I'd never heard of sshfs before, this is good stuff. I had kind of given up on graphical file transfers between machines, I might have to give this a try.

On an unrelated note, kudos on your excellent taste in classic FPSs =)

EDIT: I recalled using FUSE of some sort (doesn't look like the same project) to mount exFAT filesystems on Mac back in the day, so I took a closer look. Lo' and behold, I was not expecting to find this little gem from the MacFUSE website:

Takiing a closer look at YoutuveFS: https://code.google.com/archive/p/youtubefs/

"Currently YoutubeFS works on Linux (Ubuntu 7.10) and Mac OS (Leopard 10.5.1). Please refer to the quick start guide for more details."

Clearly it's been mothballed for quite some time, but I smell a weekend project brewing. I wonder if this would be a viable option for PPC YT....

Great find @cellularmitosis