7 ms·

i've always wanted to use sshfs but never id. I used to set it up and get hung mounts all the time (typically from transient failures) so it was really annoying

i've always wanted to use sshfs but never id. I used to set it up and get hung mounts all the time (typically from transient failures) so it was really annoying to use. For the most part scp or rsync gets the job done for me, which is strange considering a real file system should be way more useful. What are peoples use cases for sshfs and is there alternative workflows?

jokethrowaway 4y ago
I used it a lot when I was running a Linux desktop and deploying random things on vps. Nowadays I mainly use docker-machine (can't say I recommend it, but it does the job)
mistrial9 4y ago
satisifed user of rclone here
woogley 4y ago
I used to use SSHFS to have access to remote files in the OS file browser. But I moved onto WebDAV (via lighttpd) because I like managing the auth outside of PAM and also OS file browsers (including Win/Mac) have good support for it
gralx 4y ago
You mount the remote file system as a volume and traverse it as part of the local file system. Super convenient for comparing contents of a local folder to a remote in the command line, using local tools on the remote FS, batch copying both ways, all that good stuff. The hung file systems can be a buttpain, enough that I wrote a Bash script that calls `mount` to get the hung FS IDs and `umount` them with the results. After that easy peasy.
bigpeopleareold 4y ago
I wish sshfs worked for me and hope it gets attention for someone knowledgeable. The primary issue I had was when resuming my laptop is that it would freeze the system waiting to reconnect.
Filligree 4y ago
A (better?) alternative to sshfs is Syncthing, which works somewhat like a self-hosted Dropbox; it automatically synchronizes a subtree between computers. I've used it for years, with no problems at all. Maybe it won't handle concurrent edits to the same file well, but that's not something I do. Meanwhile, the hung mount problem in sshfs can be more or less fixed by giving it the right mount options; perhaps something along the lines of https://github.com/Baughn/machine-config/blob/041e2151dffd8ef4de94d7e5898630186b2c6818/saya/hardware-configuration.nix#L31 https://github.com/Baughn/machine-config/blob/041e2151dffd8e... will be helpful. Unfortunately these aren't the default.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I use both, and while SyncThing is beautiful, it doesn't cover the use cases of sshfs, where you don't even need to install anything. I'm not going to install SyncThing on a server when I just want to patch a python file or copy some log archives.
  - dTal 4y ago
    Additionally, there's a wide semantic gap between "make the remote tree appear local" and "make a local copy of the entire remote tree".
  - grepfru_it 4y ago
    Why wouldn’t you just.. scp?
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      I don't know. How faster can scp make this workflow? 1. Open the terminal and mount sshfs. 2. Open Dolphin and Ctrl+Click 10 files among tens. 3. Cut, paste locally. 4. Unmount sshfs.
- bityard 4y ago
  SSHFS and Syncthing are so different from each other, almost the only thing they have in common is that they talk on a network. Very different tools for very different use cases.
NackerHughes 4y ago
I had the same problem when I first started using sshfs. I found that adding the following to my sshfs invocation did the trick: -o reconnect -o ServerAliveInterval=5
- djbusby 4y ago
  Can put those in the ssh user config file
chasil 4y ago
NFS is more flexible in dynamic mapping of new users; sshfs will take a mapfile at startup but it cannot be changed unless the service is restarted. NFS is also more tolerant to breaking and resuming the TCP connection; this is fatal to sshfs. Encrypting NFS is a bit of a Rube-Goldberg machine, which I covered here: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/encrypting-nfsv4-stunnel-tls https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/encrypting-nfsv4-stunne...
- mickeyp 4y ago
  > NFS is also more tolerant to breaking and resuming the TCP connection; this is fatal to sshfs. Except when... - The kernel driver crashes, resulting in unkillable processes and orphaned, mounted files that, if accessed, result in those very processes also being unresponsive and unkillable. The solution? Reboot your machine. - There is packet loss on the network which can greatly compromise the stability of the NFS client. The solution? Don't have packet loss. - The RPC daemon somehow goes out of lockstep with the kernel, causing hanging and crashes. The solution? Don't let the RPC daemon get out of lockstep --- somehow. - You foolishly misconfigure the mount options, causing NFS to hang or time out if there's even a minor issue. Woe betide you if you muck up the timeout, retrans, etc. flags. The solution? Know the arcana and all your needs ahead of time, or be prepared for days of debugging. NFS sure is convenient and useful, but it's also terrible and antiquated.
  - __turbobrew__ 4y ago
    Yea, NFS processes can get into an uninterruptible and unkillable sleep state where then only way to clean up is to reboot.
    - bravetraveler 4y ago
      So glad/validated to see this thread. I always inevitably end up ranting about this when NFS comes up. The frustrating thing is, a shocking number of people either don't realize it or simply can't. I've lost weeks of my life to D-state. All TCP, all new protocol revisions. Datacenter wide deployment with redundant ports, paths, everything.
dj_gitmo 4y ago
If you just want light-weight mirroring I recommend lsyncd. For example work if you want to work on code locally and have it mirrored on a remote host. It's more reliable because it just mirrors files rather than mounting file systems or block devices. Lsyncd uses a filesystem event interface (inotify or fsevents) to watch for changes to local files and directories. Lsyncd collates these events for several seconds and then spawns one or more processes to synchronize the changes to a remote filesystem. The default synchronization method is rsync. Thus, Lsyncd is a light-weight live mirror solution. Lsyncd is comparatively easy to install and does not require new filesystems or block devices. Lysncd does not hamper local filesystem performance. https://lsyncd.github.io/lsyncd/ https://lsyncd.github.io/lsyncd/
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
I use it for browsing/copying/editing files on remote servers. Once you've got ssh passwordless authentication set up with the server, then it's easy to add in a systemd automount for it in your /etc/fstab. I like the authentication and encryption compared to NFS though it is slower, so more for accessing specific files. Example /etc/fstab line: root@remote:/ /mnt/sshfs/remote fuse.sshfs noauto,x-systemd.automount,_netdev,user,idmap=user,follow_symlinks,reconnect,transform_symlinks,identityfile=/root/.ssh/id_rsa,allow_other,default_permissions,uid=1000,gid=1000
- catdog 4y ago
  I usually add sth. like ServerAliveCountMax=5,ServerAliveInterval=2,ConnectTimeout=2 to avoid it hanging for too long if the network goes away, works like a charm.
usr1106 4y ago
The use case for sshfs that you can quickly get access to all the files accessible to you in some machine without needing to be root either local or remotely. I have had very stable networks for over 10 years in most of my work, so I don't think I haver ever suffered from hangups. It does not fail gracefully when you read or write bigger files than your connection can decently handle. But I don't know which system would behave better under such conditions.
albertzeyer 4y ago
We used it for PyCharm to overcome its limitation with remote editing support. In the past, I also used it as an alternative to Samba or NFS.
ASalazarMX 4y ago
I use it for temporary connections for file management since a few years ago, and it always has been very stable. Never left it connected for more than 24 hours, though.
- djbusby 4y ago
  I have sshfs connections open for weeks at a time (except when network interrupts). Works awesome. Just remount and keeps going. I don't have open handles to files there for weeks, just mounts - then open file, edit, close and it again, 100s of times a day. I love sshfs.
Jach 4y ago
I use it with my NAS.
Perz1val 4y ago
SSHFS is used by KDE Connect to see files on the other device
- bityard 4y ago
  I don't think that's true. On my GNOME system GSConnect uses GIO. I don't have a KDE system to look at right now but I would eat my hat if they're using SSHFS instead of KIO.
FullyFunctional 4y ago
NFSv4 (not NFSv3 or earlier) is the most efficient network FS protocol (beats SMB in all my testing), but I frequently access work machines over VPN and can't use NFS because of many reasons in which case SSHFS is very convenient. ADD: Some might not be aware that NFSv4 is a MAJOR change from the earlier versions and has many radical changes, including: time-expiring lease-based coherency, bundled requests (do much more in each NFSv4 network packet), locking built-in to the protocol. Don't don't base your assumptions of NFS on NFSv3. Some on this thread suggests Syncthing, scp, rsync, etc, but this not really the same. When the file system is enormous and you need to commit your changes back - it would be impractical to sync everything (many TiB of data) and a pain to try to remember which things changed. The situation on macOS has been a bit sad; Mac Homebrew refuse to install sshfs as Mac FUSE is not open source (because the author got fed up with commercial abuse of his work). I sympathize, but that still leaves me in limbo. Ideally, Apple should just include a FUSE like facility in macOS as it's so useful.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  Oh wow, inspired by the stunnel above I just successfully used $ ssh -Nf -L2049:my-nas:2049 my-gw $ sudo mount -t nfs -o vers=4 localhost:/mnt/somewhere/username /home to mount my home (5,000 miles from where I currently sit) over ssh (over zerotier) without needing SSHFS. I'm going to use this going forward.
  - maccam94 4y ago
    Beware, you may need to do a significant amount of sysctl tuning/mount option tweaking to get fast NFS performance over high latency networks.
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      Thanks, got pointers? It already works very well (seat-of-the-pants feels comparable to or better than my sshfs recollection); I managed to build Rust projects over it (with target on local FS). Googling around suggest bumping the TCP transfer window but I don't see that as option in macOS's man mount_nfs, or any other useful option for that matter.
jessikat 4y ago
I use winfsp/sshfs-win to remotely access my Haiku system, which works extremely well.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

I used it a lot when I was running a Linux desktop and deploying random things on vps. Nowadays I mainly use docker-machine (can't say I recommend it, but it does the job)

mistrial9 4y ago

satisifed user of rclone here

woogley 4y ago

I used to use SSHFS to have access to remote files in the OS file browser. But I moved onto WebDAV (via lighttpd) because I like managing the auth outside of PAM and also OS file browsers (including Win/Mac) have good support for it

gralx 4y ago

You mount the remote file system as a volume and traverse it as part of the local file system. Super convenient for comparing contents of a local folder to a remote in the command line, using local tools on the remote FS, batch copying both ways, all that good stuff. The hung file systems can be a buttpain, enough that I wrote a Bash script that calls `mount` to get the hung FS IDs and `umount` them with the results. After that easy peasy.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

I wish sshfs worked for me and hope it gets attention for someone knowledgeable. The primary issue I had was when resuming my laptop is that it would freeze the system waiting to reconnect.

Filligree 4y ago

A (better?) alternative to sshfs is Syncthing, which works somewhat like a self-hosted Dropbox; it automatically synchronizes a subtree between computers. I've used it for years, with no problems at all. Maybe it won't handle concurrent edits to the same file well, but that's not something I do. Meanwhile, the hung mount problem in sshfs can be more or less fixed by giving it the right mount options; perhaps something along the lines of https://github.com/Baughn/machine-config/blob/041e2151dffd8ef4de94d7e5898630186b2c6818/saya/hardware-configuration.nix#L31 https://github.com/Baughn/machine-config/blob/041e2151dffd8e... will be helpful. Unfortunately these aren't the default.

ASalazarMX 4y ago
I use both, and while SyncThing is beautiful, it doesn't cover the use cases of sshfs, where you don't even need to install anything. I'm not going to install SyncThing on a server when I just want to patch a python file or copy some log archives.
- dTal 4y ago
  Additionally, there's a wide semantic gap between "make the remote tree appear local" and "make a local copy of the entire remote tree".
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  Why wouldn’t you just.. scp?
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    I don't know. How faster can scp make this workflow? 1. Open the terminal and mount sshfs. 2. Open Dolphin and Ctrl+Click 10 files among tens. 3. Cut, paste locally. 4. Unmount sshfs.
bityard 4y ago
SSHFS and Syncthing are so different from each other, almost the only thing they have in common is that they talk on a network. Very different tools for very different use cases.

NackerHughes 4y ago

I had the same problem when I first started using sshfs. I found that adding the following to my sshfs invocation did the trick: -o reconnect -o ServerAliveInterval=5

djbusby 4y ago
Can put those in the ssh user config file

chasil 4y ago

NFS is more flexible in dynamic mapping of new users; sshfs will take a mapfile at startup but it cannot be changed unless the service is restarted. NFS is also more tolerant to breaking and resuming the TCP connection; this is fatal to sshfs. Encrypting NFS is a bit of a Rube-Goldberg machine, which I covered here: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/encrypting-nfsv4-stunnel-tls https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/encrypting-nfsv4-stunne...

mickeyp 4y ago
> NFS is also more tolerant to breaking and resuming the TCP connection; this is fatal to sshfs. Except when... - The kernel driver crashes, resulting in unkillable processes and orphaned, mounted files that, if accessed, result in those very processes also being unresponsive and unkillable. The solution? Reboot your machine. - There is packet loss on the network which can greatly compromise the stability of the NFS client. The solution? Don't have packet loss. - The RPC daemon somehow goes out of lockstep with the kernel, causing hanging and crashes. The solution? Don't let the RPC daemon get out of lockstep --- somehow. - You foolishly misconfigure the mount options, causing NFS to hang or time out if there's even a minor issue. Woe betide you if you muck up the timeout, retrans, etc. flags. The solution? Know the arcana and all your needs ahead of time, or be prepared for days of debugging. NFS sure is convenient and useful, but it's also terrible and antiquated.
- __turbobrew__ 4y ago
  Yea, NFS processes can get into an uninterruptible and unkillable sleep state where then only way to clean up is to reboot.
  - bravetraveler 4y ago
    So glad/validated to see this thread. I always inevitably end up ranting about this when NFS comes up. The frustrating thing is, a shocking number of people either don't realize it or simply can't. I've lost weeks of my life to D-state. All TCP, all new protocol revisions. Datacenter wide deployment with redundant ports, paths, everything.

dj_gitmo 4y ago

If you just want light-weight mirroring I recommend lsyncd. For example work if you want to work on code locally and have it mirrored on a remote host. It's more reliable because it just mirrors files rather than mounting file systems or block devices. Lsyncd uses a filesystem event interface (inotify or fsevents) to watch for changes to local files and directories. Lsyncd collates these events for several seconds and then spawns one or more processes to synchronize the changes to a remote filesystem. The default synchronization method is rsync. Thus, Lsyncd is a light-weight live mirror solution. Lsyncd is comparatively easy to install and does not require new filesystems or block devices. Lysncd does not hamper local filesystem performance. https://lsyncd.github.io/lsyncd/ https://lsyncd.github.io/lsyncd/

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

I use it for browsing/copying/editing files on remote servers. Once you've got ssh passwordless authentication set up with the server, then it's easy to add in a systemd automount for it in your /etc/fstab. I like the authentication and encryption compared to NFS though it is slower, so more for accessing specific files. Example /etc/fstab line: root@remote:/ /mnt/sshfs/remote fuse.sshfs noauto,x-systemd.automount,_netdev,user,idmap=user,follow_symlinks,reconnect,transform_symlinks,identityfile=/root/.ssh/id_rsa,allow_other,default_permissions,uid=1000,gid=1000

catdog 4y ago
I usually add sth. like ServerAliveCountMax=5,ServerAliveInterval=2,ConnectTimeout=2 to avoid it hanging for too long if the network goes away, works like a charm.

usr1106 4y ago

The use case for sshfs that you can quickly get access to all the files accessible to you in some machine without needing to be root either local or remotely. I have had very stable networks for over 10 years in most of my work, so I don't think I haver ever suffered from hangups. It does not fail gracefully when you read or write bigger files than your connection can decently handle. But I don't know which system would behave better under such conditions.

albertzeyer 4y ago

We used it for PyCharm to overcome its limitation with remote editing support. In the past, I also used it as an alternative to Samba or NFS.

ASalazarMX 4y ago

I use it for temporary connections for file management since a few years ago, and it always has been very stable. Never left it connected for more than 24 hours, though.

djbusby 4y ago
I have sshfs connections open for weeks at a time (except when network interrupts). Works awesome. Just remount and keeps going. I don't have open handles to files there for weeks, just mounts - then open file, edit, close and it again, 100s of times a day. I love sshfs.

Jach 4y ago

I use it with my NAS.

Perz1val 4y ago

SSHFS is used by KDE Connect to see files on the other device

bityard 4y ago
I don't think that's true. On my GNOME system GSConnect uses GIO. I don't have a KDE system to look at right now but I would eat my hat if they're using SSHFS instead of KIO.

FullyFunctional 4y ago

NFSv4 (not NFSv3 or earlier) is the most efficient network FS protocol (beats SMB in all my testing), but I frequently access work machines over VPN and can't use NFS because of many reasons in which case SSHFS is very convenient. ADD: Some might not be aware that NFSv4 is a MAJOR change from the earlier versions and has many radical changes, including: time-expiring lease-based coherency, bundled requests (do much more in each NFSv4 network packet), locking built-in to the protocol. Don't don't base your assumptions of NFS on NFSv3. Some on this thread suggests Syncthing, scp, rsync, etc, but this not really the same. When the file system is enormous and you need to commit your changes back - it would be impractical to sync everything (many TiB of data) and a pain to try to remember which things changed. The situation on macOS has been a bit sad; Mac Homebrew refuse to install sshfs as Mac FUSE is not open source (because the author got fed up with commercial abuse of his work). I sympathize, but that still leaves me in limbo. Ideally, Apple should just include a FUSE like facility in macOS as it's so useful.

FullyFunctional 4y ago
Oh wow, inspired by the stunnel above I just successfully used $ ssh -Nf -L2049:my-nas:2049 my-gw $ sudo mount -t nfs -o vers=4 localhost:/mnt/somewhere/username /home to mount my home (5,000 miles from where I currently sit) over ssh (over zerotier) without needing SSHFS. I'm going to use this going forward.
- maccam94 4y ago
  Beware, you may need to do a significant amount of sysctl tuning/mount option tweaking to get fast NFS performance over high latency networks.
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    Thanks, got pointers? It already works very well (seat-of-the-pants feels comparable to or better than my sshfs recollection); I managed to build Rust projects over it (with target on local FS). Googling around suggest bumping the TCP transfer window but I don't see that as option in macOS's man mount_nfs, or any other useful option for that matter.

jessikat 4y ago

I use winfsp/sshfs-win to remotely access my Haiku system, which works extremely well.