HOWTO: Mount SSH Shares

sshfs has the advantage over a KIOslave or GnomeVFS that any program can use it. For instance, in Kubuntu Amarok wasn't able to play my remote music through fish:/ but worked fine using sshfs.

1) Install the software sudo apt-get install sshfs

2) Add fuse to /etc/modules sudo nano /etc/modules

3) Add yourself to the 'fuse' group, then log out and log in again. sudo adduser your-username fuse

4) Create a mountpoint and give yourself ownership sudo mkdir /media/mount-name sudo chown your-username /media/mount-name

5) Mount the filesystem sshfs remote-system-name:/remote-folder /media/mount-name

6) Unmount the filesystem fusermount -u /media/mount-name

Directions taken from http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/28/how-to-mount-a-remote-ssh-filesystem-using-sshfs/ More info on sshfs is available at http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

I've run into a strange problem on two Kubuntu machines where, after using sshfs, you're unable to unlock your own computer. Logging in works fine, but you can't return from a password-protected screensaver. My solution was to start a new session, change my password, then return to the old session and use the new password to unlock it.

[cdean@frog ~]$ sshfs 192.168.1.3: linuxbox
cdean@192.168.1.3's password:
fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

I'm getting that error after following the HOWTO...

isn't NFS far more better? i use NFS to connect any linux laptop to my external HDD and windows clients use samba, everything is extremely fast and just amasing

isn't NFS far more better? i use NFS to connect any linux laptop to my external HDD and windows clients use samba, everything is extremely fast and just amasing

I think that the security of the encrypted connection that SSH provides is the major advantage here. Also, on a local network, NFS and Samba are just fine (they'd be presumably blocked behind a firewall?), but if you want to have access to those shared directories from an "outside" network, you can just re-use the SSH port.

I think that the security of the encrypted connection that SSH provides is the major advantage here. Also, on a local network, NFS and Samba are just fine (they'd be presumably blocked behind a firewall?), but if you want to have access to those shared directories from an "outside" network, you can just re-use the SSH port. yes actually i have a firewall and i don't allow access to prtmap/nfs ports, anyway my ssh port is not the default how to make it use another port then 22?

I did this and it worked fine. However, how can I verify the mount (other than using it)? In other words, the "df" command does not show the sshfs mounted drive. How to view the mount ?

yes actually i have a firewall and i don't allow access to prtmap/nfs ports, anyway my ssh port is not the default how to make it use another port then 22?

With sshfs -p option.

• GC

``` [cdean@frog ~]$ sshfs 192.168.1.3: linuxbox cdean@192.168.1.3's password: fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

I'm getting that error after following the HOWTO...[/QUOTE]

Well perhaps reading the instructions might help.. ```
5) Mount the filesystem
sshfs remote-system-name:/remote-folder /media/mount-name

ie: home folder on remote system, and /media/dot3home .. just persay.. sshfs 192.168.1.3:/home/cdean /media/dot3home

``` [cdean@frog ~]$ sshfs 192.168.1.3: linuxbox cdean@192.168.1.3's password: fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

I'm getting that error after following the HOWTO...[/quote]


I believed that fusemount is installed so root only and execute it try the following.

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount

- GC

thanx for the guide..:)

I did this and it worked fine. However, how can I verify the mount (other than using it)? In other words, the "df" command does not show the sshfs mounted drive. How to view the mount ?

try a last time: anyone know the answer to this question ? I did see that a "ps aux" shows the repeat of the command, but that is it so far...

I believed that fusemount is installed so root only and execute it

This will not be the case if you follow step 3.

3) Add yourself to the 'fuse' group, then log out and log in again. sudo adduser your-username fuse

I did this and it worked fine. However, how can I verify the mount (other than using it)? In other words, the "df" command does not show the sshfs mounted drive. How to view the mount ?

I'm not at my system to check, but I would expect an entry in /etc/mtab. df is known not to work: "Certain command-line tools (such as df) do not work properly due to shortcomings in the OpenSSH implementation of sftp. To work around these holes, sshfs has to estimate disk usage and free space, which could complicate its usage for some tasks."

This kind of a solution is sooo much better than KDE and Gnomes vfs stuff. Can't wait till the desktops just use this.

This will not be the case if you follow step 3.

3) Add yourself to the 'fuse' group, then log out and log in again. sudo adduser your-username fuse

And if you read cdean's comments he stated that he "DID" following the instructions. So if this infact was the case and it still did not allow him to execute fusemount my post would fix the problem.

• GC

heh.. just got to thinking.. any way to get windows XP or older to login to a ssh server like this and mount a remote folder and such? would be great, seeing as how i have wifi here and samba is a little insecure.. i could use samba for the read-only side and should i ever be in windows and need to upload something, instead of messing with SCP, just find a mounted drive?

When I try and move a file to my fuse mounted folder it says the following: mv: failed to preserve ownership for `/media/prod_server/DownArrow.png': Permission denied

Is this like NFS and you have to have the same user ID stuff set up?

And if you read cdean's comments he stated that he "DID" following the instructions. So if this infact was the case and it still did not allow him to execute fusemount my post would fix the problem.

He could have missed a step, misstyped something, forgotten to reboot, etc. I know I make little mistakes all the time. If he followed the directions, and as a member of the fuse group he cannot execute a file which is *-rwsr-xr-- 1 root fuse* then there is a problem with his sytem that shouldn't be glossed over.

When I try and move a file to my fuse mounted folder it says the following: mv: failed to preserve ownership for `/media/prod_server/DownArrow.png': Permission denied Is this like NFS and you have to have the same user ID stuff set up?

No, sshfs is just like normal ssh, you only need an account on the remote machine. If you look in /etc/mtab when you have a sshfs filesystem mounted you should see a line like

sshfs#bob@192.168.1.10:/home/bob /home/jane/sshfs fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,max_read=65536,user=jane 0 0

In this example, jane is connected as bob to his home directory on another machine. All files owned by bob will appear to be owned by jane. I'm not sure why you received that error.

Great howto -- works like a charm!

Thanks very much; it was just what I was looking for! :smile:

I did this and it worked fine. However, how can I verify the mount (other than using it)? In other words, the "df" command does not show the sshfs mounted drive. How to view the mount ?

I seem to remember that df *did* show the mounted drive! I'm not at work now, so I can't check it.

Perhaps I typed "df -a" or something. I seem to remember that "df" with no parameters showed a limited list. Or try "df /myMountPoint".

Another way to verify the mount: list the contents of the mountpoint! That works of course if the mounted disk is not empty.

Nice tip, thanks.

"df -a" shows it, as does "cat /etc/mtab" :)

I've followed the how-to, but am still having a problem. Any help is appreciated. I have ssh set up and working between my client (laptop) and server (desktop). I've installed sshfs and its dependencies. I've created a user-owned mountpoint on the client machine. I added fuse to /etc/modules, and ``` pmorris@ubuntu:~ $ lsmod | grep fuse fuse 36748 0

fusermount: failed to create device node: Operation not permitted
fusermount: fuse device not found, try 'modprobe fuse' first

192.168.1.103:</path/to/share> </path/to/mountpoint>, I get the following error:```

fusermount: failed to create device node: Operation not permitted fusermount: fuse device not found, try 'modprobe fuse' first

Have you logged off, or rebooted,  and logged back in?

Have you logged off, or rebooted, and logged back in?Yes, I've done that more than once. I also added myself to the "fuse" group.

Update: Well, I got it working. I changed the group of /dev/fuse from root to fuse, and reinstalled sshfs, and fuse-utils, and it's working now. I don't know exactly what was wrong, but it's working now.

Thanks, it worked!

The only problem is that nautilus thinks that the ssh shares have 0kb free space, so I can't create new files. I can edit the old ones just fine though.. Does anyone have any ideas what could be done about this?

I too was tearing my hair out with the ``` fusermount: mount failed: Operation not permitted

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/fusermount

Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
sshfs#yj@ubuntu:/home/yj/
                        976563         0    976563   0% /mnt/remote_home

cat /etc/mtab:
sshfs#yj@ubuntu:/home/yj/ /mnt/remote_home fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,max_read=65536 0 0

sudo ls -lad /mnt/remote_home:
drwxr-xr-x 1 yj users 6328 2006-03-08 17:49 /mnt/remote_home

id:
uid=1000(yj) gid=114(fuse) groups=4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),106(lpadmin),107(scanner),108(admin),114(fuse),1000(yj)

BUT:
cd /mnt/remote_home:
bash: cd: /mnt/remote_home: Permission denied

WHY?

sshfs has the advantage over a KIOslave or GnomeVFS that any program can use it. For instance, in Kubuntu Amarok wasn't able to play my remote music through fish:/ but worked fine using sshfs. sshfs remote-system-name:/remote-folder /media/mount-name

Hi, great HOWTO

is it possible to add to line:

sshfs usre_name@remote-system-name:/remote-folder /media/mount-name

password?

I woluld like to add this line to KDE start, so I will have share mounted every time a start a computer

Wow... thats all i can say after doing this myself.. i had a couple of folders totalling a few hundred pictures, on a different computer in the house, that i needed on my laptop... i had been looking for a reason to use sshfs, and i figured SCP would be a bit too long of a command to get all my files from there to here.... and Damn! its fast! even thumbnailing pictures that are 1mb each, over 54mbps wireless, .. it was the same as if the pictures were on this harddrive already!

My opinion: A HELL of a replacement to samba!. samba is incredibly slow compared to this next thing for me to try is whatever nfs is... hmmm...

i have followed all the steps in the hoiwto but i keep getting this message: remote host has disconnected

do i have to add the share on my remote system?

any help thanks.

thnx! sshfs, why didnt I know before?

i have followed all the steps in the hoiwto but i keep getting this message: remote host has disconnected

do i have to add the share on my remote system?

any help thanks.

I see you are using dapper. So am I. I used sshfs without problems in breezy but now it doesn't work in dapper.

As far as I can tell it's a problem with the kernel used with dapper. It seems the author of sshfs needs to update the software to deal with this issue. Quite a bummer, as I'm quite used to sshfs by now.

Someone else reported the same problem here and could only resolve it by downgrading the kernel:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10123569&forum_id=47044

Someone else reported the same problem here and could only resolve it by downgrading the kernel:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10123569&forum_id=47044

OK, user stupidity (mine) was at fault here. Apparently the disconnected message happens whenever the named host is nonexistent or unreachable. It should really say "host not found," but it says disconnected instead. So if you get that error message, make sure you are able to ssh in to the host exactly as it's being passed to sshfs.

Thanks, it worked!

The only problem is that nautilus thinks that the ssh shares have 0kb free space, so I can't create new files. I can edit the old ones just fine though.. Does anyone have any ideas what could be done about this? i also show 0 free space when mounting this way. i cannot create new files because my client thinks there is no freespace.

i am able to mount this way, and i am able to view the shares. it just shows 0 free space.

found it. according to this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=174691&highlight=fuse+free

this is a "glitch" in the sshfs and file transfer can be done by the cli only.

I am using edgy and installed sshfs according to post #1 and I got an error, too:

fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

So my solution was to

sudo chgrp fuse /dev/fuse

and it worked.

Can it be that this is a bug in the installation that should be reported?

Thanks, Reinhard

anybody know how to get write access to a share? i tried adding to the sshfs command "-o uid=1000" where 1000 is my user id. it changed the user id of the folders in the mount to mine, but i still can't write to the directories :(

From jonny's post #28

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/fusermount

Thanks, this solved my problems.

I am using Ubuntu Edgy and could only mount as root and had to access files from the CLI. Now things appear to work properly and I can mount as a user and use Nautilus.

cdean said:

[cdean@frog ~]$ sshfs 192.168.1.3: linuxbox cdean@192.168.1.3's password: fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

I'm getting that error after following the HOWTO...

I think you missed the bit about logging back out and back in. You've added yourself to the fuse group with:

> 3) Add yourself to the 'fuse' group, then log out and log in again.
sudo adduser your-username fuse

If you don't logout and back in then your session doesn't pick up the fuser group. I was too lazy to log out so I just did:

 su - my-username

It asked for my password, and hey presto a new session with the new groups. Just type 'groups' to see what groups your session has.

If you are still getting permission errors, make sure you log out and back in again for the group permissions to be re-evaluated. Otherwise you will have added yourself to the fuse group but not seen the effect.

--G

I've pretty much gotten ssfhs working the way I want.

I works perfectly for file-operations, playing multimedia, etc etc.

Today when I was working in Kword I noticed something disturbing thought. The first time I save my dokument it saves perfectly, but when I continues to save the updated dokument (same filename) nothing happens. It is still the orginal file from the first save with the same timestamp and content.

Something is registred thought, because at the moment of saving the filname~ (backupfile) is created. No matter how many save I do it is still just a backup of the orginal save.

When I try to reproduce the same problem in OpenOffice-writer and Emacs the saving behaves as it should. They continue to save new content, just as they should.

Anyone who has any idéa why Kword and sshfs don't get along?

Below follow the sshfs-mount in question.

sshfs#mauddib:/home/andreas/Documents on /home/andreas/Documents type fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,max_read=65536,user=andreas)

Well, I found the solution to the problem with sshfs and koffice, mentioned above.

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126846 (Additional Comment #5)

In short, you want to use: -o workaround=rename

Thanks, it seems Edgy have this problem! ](*,)

Gandalf said: isn't NFS far more better? i use NFS to connect any linux laptop to my external HDD and windows clients use samba, everything is extremely fast and just amasing

To quote http://linux.inet.hr/sshfs_secure_and_transparent_access_to_remote_filesystems.html:

While sshfs may not be as fast and featureful as other full-blown network filesystems such as NFS or Samba, it still has some great features:

* very easy to use, on the server side there's nothing to do, on the client side mounting the filesystem is as easy as logging into the server with ssh * provides secure (encrypted) access to remote files * has decent performance (multithreaded, caching directory contents and allowing large reads) * should work well even over slow and/or unstable links (think dialup), knows how to reconnect to the server when the connection is broken

A matter of taste and what suits one's needs really.

Btw - here is a similar thread that goes a bit further: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=324254

I love sshfs and the fact that the use of it in conjunction with nautilus blows away all other FTP programs available for the Linux and Windows Desktops. Working on webprojects today is much leaner and efficent - not to say more good looking!

To get around this error: glib-2.0fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied I needed to do this chmod two files: $ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount $ sudo chmod a+rw /dev/fuse I tried putting my user in the 'fuse' group and logging back in, but that didn't help.

Yours, Noah

What if my username on the server I'm trying to log in to is different than my account name in Ubuntu? I don't see any way for sshfs to handle that.

Gah nevermined. It was a typo.

FYI, it seems that the location of fusermount has changed as of Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) It's now in /bin/fusermount instead of /usr/bin/fusermount

penvzila said: What if my username on the server I'm trying to log in to is different than my account name in Ubuntu? I don't see any way for sshfs to handle that.

You just put your remote username and @ before the remote machine address, like so:``` sshfs username@remote-system-name:/remote-folder /media/mount-name

how to make it other way - mount local folder on remote ssh server. my computer client's fodler mount to ssh server ?

I had the same problem and this is what I did to fix it!

#add user to fuse adduser user fuse

Then this part is what took me the longest to figure out.

LOGOFF!!

Yep after four hours it dawned on me that maybe in order to reset my group setting I may have to logoff!!

Work great!

I'm compiling fuse for developing. The source was retrieved by apt-get and was compiled naively with no additional option. This is what I got when trying the example in fuse code:

fusermount: mount failed: Operation not permitted

I've looked at all the suggestions in previous threads and I'm sure that there's nothing wrong with my setup. After banging my head on the wall and lots of hair pulling, this is what I've found:

• The binaries in fuse example link against libfuse.so in my compilation, which turns out to be the problem.
• To validate this, I wrote a small program using fuse. Linking against the libfuse.so provided by Ubuntu works just fine, but linking against the one I compiled poses "Operation not permitted".

I thought I missed some option during configure, but it turns out not very likely. So I think Ubuntu is doing something funky here.

And btw, this is Ubuntu Hardy and fuse-2.7.2. I hope this can save some of us lots of frustrating hours.

Cheers.

When I first started to use sshfs a couple of months ago, I found that copying files and browsing directories would cause my system to hang ... only for a couple of seconds - but it was enough to make the system cumbersome.

Adding the following parameters to the standard 'sshfs' command, made my connection run MUCH faster.. ymmv, but I thought I'd pass on the tip.

-o ServerAliveInterval=15 -o cache_timeout=600

GrammatonCleric said: I believed that fusemount is installed so root only and execute it try the following.

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount

• GC

All,

I was having the same problem until I used an option with sshfs:

$ sudo sshfs [COLOR=Red]-o allow_other[/COLOR] <SERVER_SSH_USERNAME>@<SERVER_EXTERNAL_IP>:/<SHARED_DIRECTORY_ON_SERVER> /<WHERE_TO_MOUNT_ON_CLIENT> 

The -o allow_other will allow any user on the local client to open the folder. Remember that the read/write is done on the Server side not on the client side. But the access to the SSH pipe is determined on the client side. Thus this option is allowing any user to access the ssh pipe!

Ahhhh, encryption!! :)

I followed the instructions in the initial post with perfect success! Thank you!

withdrawn

sciurus said: sshfs has the advantage over a KIOslave or GnomeVFS that any program can use it. For instance, in Kubuntu Amarok wasn't able to play my remote music through fish:/ but worked fine using sshfs.

1) Install the software sudo apt-get install sshfs

2) Add fuse to /etc/modules sudo nano /etc/modules

3) Add yourself to the 'fuse' group, then log out and log in again. sudo adduser your-username fuse

4) Create a mountpoint and give yourself ownership sudo mkdir /media/mount-name sudo chown your-username /media/mount-name

5) Mount the filesystem sshfs remote-system-name:/remote-folder /media/mount-name

6) Unmount the filesystem fusermount -u /media/mount-name

Directions taken from http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/28/how-to-mount-a-remote-ssh-filesystem-using-sshfs/ More info on sshfs is available at http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

I've run into a strange problem on two Kubuntu machines where, after using sshfs, you're unable to unlock your own computer. Logging in works fine, but you can't return from a password-protected screensaver. My solution was to start a new session, change my password, then return to the old session and use the new password to unlock it.

Thanks a lot - works.