SSHFS AUTOmount on Feisty

[christian.paratschek]

This does not work for me (Gutsy on the client, Etch on the server). I have successfully exported the ssh key. So passwordless ssh into my remote box works.

As long as I keep "BatchMode=Yes" OUT of my fstab entry, I can mount the remote folder as expected: manually, as user with a simple "mount /mountpoint" command.

When I put "BatchMode=Yes" into the fstab-entry, I can no longer mount the server manually, I get a "read: Connection reset by peer"-error. Of course automounting also doesn't work.

Regards,
Christian

[Darwin Award Winner]

Oops, ssh options are case sensitive. The "yes" should be all lower case. I've fixed that in my howto.

[christian.paratschek]

OK, this problem is solved. Mounting the server manually works now even with "BatchMode=yes" in the fstab-line. I can happily mount/unmount with "mount /mnt/point" and "umount /mnt/point" - as non-root user.

But... Automounting still does not work!

If I execute /etc/network/if-up.d/mountsshfs from a terminal (sudo or as normal user), nothing happens. Permissions are set, file is executable:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3018 2007-10-29 22:14 mountsshfs

Note: only my non-root user has ssh-keys stored on the server. Root would need a password to ssh into the server. But I didn't set that intentionally, because I thought it is enough to have a normal user have passwordless login. Am I correct?

Regards,
Christian

[christian.paratschek]

I've found a nice addition to your fstab-entry.

If you plan zu use rsync to sync files from your local machine to your ssh-server, you need "workaround=rename"

Otherwise, you will not be able to update an older version of a file with a newer one. Without this option, you will be able to create files and folders and delete them, but you will get an error like this, if you try to update a file:

rsync: rename "/home/christian/Server/xxx/yyy/.index.html.Q3Btvn" -> "xxx/yyy/index.html": Operation not permitted (1)

[christian.paratschek]

It works now, thank you!

[christian.paratschek]

Another edit: the scripts work flawlessly from outside: if I use my external IP and connect from somewhere to my homeserver, everything works as intended.

It does, however, NOT work for me if I substitute the external IP address with the internal one and try to connect from within my LAN.

That's why I didn't get it to work in the beginning: I always tried from within my LAN. Today I tried from outside and suddenly everything worked.

This is strange because it doesn't make sense to me: I can ssh into the machine with user@external-ip from outside, I can connect with user@local-ip from inside to my ssh. I can mount my share with sshfs from outside and from inside.

Only the mountsshfs script does not work when I am on the LAN.

Please don't ask me why I need ssh within my LAN, hehe - it obviously makes no sense and I should just use smb/nfs instead. But I would like to know why the script does not work from within local network.

[ieatkittens]

I have the same issue...I can mount the sshfs at my office but from home I have no such luck...

I'd love to get sshfs working for both so that I only need the single automount regardless of where I'm connecting!

Also, in your tutorial the second automation script has the same filename as the first...I believe you want us to create if-down.d/umountsshfs in place of another if-up.d/mountsshfs

It just occured to me that I can't even manually mount the points from my fstab....but the first time I connected it worked perfectly!

[Endolith]

Is there an "easy way" to do this?

GNOME's "Connect to Server", for instance, lets you connect to a folder over SSH through a menu, and it's persistent through reboots, etc. But you can't access the files in non-GNOME programs, it requires the keyring/dbus to remember the password (which doesn't work with ssh -X), and you can't mount the files inside other directories that I know of (so that Rhythmbox, etc can watch it).

SSHFS seems obviously superior. But the line I used to mount my music folder from one computer inside the music folder of another computer is three lines long, and there's no auto-complete for remote names, it's very error prone, newbs really don't want to muck around with stuff like this in their fstab, etc.

[Darwin Award Winner]

Well, my method simpy involves a few scripts and entries in fstab. The scripts could easily be installed by a deb package, but as for the fstab entries, your questions reduces to one of whether there exist any reasonable GUIs for /etc/fstab. I don't know of any.

If only GNOME mounted its virtual filesystems somewhere in the real filesystem.

[Endolith]

Well, my method simpy involves a few scripts and entries in fstab.

Of course. But its all added by hand and is still very error-prone. And the automounting depends on whether your network is up, right? Not necessarily on whether the other computer is online. And.... it just seems like a one-off thing that would work well for one person, but that there should be a more... "fundamental" way to do all this. I don't know.

The scripts could easily be installed by a deb package, but as for the fstab entries, your questions reduces to one of whether there exist any reasonable GUIs for /etc/fstab. I don't know of any.

It seems like it might be better in something completely different from fstab, like the way removable drives are automounted. I don't know how removable drives are mounted (or I could fix mine ), but I know it's not controlled by fstab and sort of works smoothly in the background. I just want to right-click something in Nautilus and say "mount an SSH folder here" and be done with it.

If only GNOME mounted its virtual filesystems somewhere in the real filesystem.

Agreed 100%. I heard somewhere that they were trying to improve GNOME VFS for situations like this, but I don't know the details.