13 ms·

A currently maintained fork of SSHFS

329 points by feldrim 3y ago

blueflow 3y ago
Good, it seems people can't stand it if software just exists and does its job and doesn't get new commits each month.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  I mostly care if projects don't accept bugfixes. For example "inotify feature longer works with the latest glibc release due to subtle API change" might be an easy 10 line pull request to fix. But if the maintainer doesn't take the pull request and make a release, then the effort of fixing it is wasted, and every single user has to workaround/suffer from that bug into the future. There are loads of projects in that state - unmerged PR's from years ago with sensible fixes, no new release, and no forks that are distributed to users.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Not to mention this scenario except when it's a security patch that just needs to be applied and released
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    I wish github and other code hosters made it easier to "just make a release". Next to the "Download zip" button on github, they should add a "Download built .deb" and "Download built .exe" - and those buttons should work on any fork, branch, PR, etc. And they should add all the necessary build infrastructure to achieve that. It turns out that at scale, build infrastructure is pretty cheap to run, since caching is so incredibly effective and there is only a need to rebuild a file once per (human) edit to a file or its dependencies.
    - _joel 3y ago
      Making a .deb isn't as simple as it might seem. If you want to use shared libraries, especially so. Which version of Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/... whatever are you targetting? You can tools like FPM[1] (which is awesome btw, used it for some great hacks in the past), but that won't make you .debs that are necessarily done to the debian guidelines but usable. There are a load os SaaS companies that do that allow you to make multiple targets though, so perhaps some integrations there would work. [1]https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        Presumably some kind of Makefile or similar build automation config file would be in the repo to define which versions of which tools to use to do the build.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        the open build service (by suse) does that. are there others?
        _joel 3y ago
        I'm certain there are more but I can only think of artifactory now and not sure that even makes the debs (does the repo stuff). Maybe there's a business plan somewhere in there :)
      - pnutjam 3y ago
        https://openbuildservice.org/help/manuals/obs-user-guide/cha.obs.build_process https://openbuildservice.org/help/manuals/obs-user-guide/cha...
    - pinusc 3y ago
      When making a github release, you can attach whatever file you want, including .exe and .deb. The problem is that building packages is kind of a nightmare, as there's at least one (or, as is the case far too often, many) build system for each programming language. Linux package management is also hard as each distro has its own way of packaging things. And you need a mac to produce macOS Applications... My point is, there is no way github could add a fully automatic "build and package this release" button. It would require tons of configuration (and trial and error...) from the user. But good news! If you _are_ willing to figure out how, you can make a github pipeline that compiles and packages your code (producing an "artifact"). Several projects I follow do exactly this. A complex problem like this essentially requires a bespoke solution, and to be fair github does give you tools to automate said solution. The problem is not the infrastructure but the complexity of build systems. I do agree there should be more ready-made pipelines to aid this process. When I tried to release a python program to work on linux, windows, and macOS, I quickly realized I wasn't interested in figuring out how to make a working pipeline (after spending a weekend getting it to build on each OS in the first place). But surely that's because python is particularly bad at package management... Well, most languages are particularly bad at it
      - lmm 3y ago
        Building packages is easy for most programming languages, it's only very old ones and Python that are bad. While I wouldn't expect GitHub to support every language, and many projects will need customization, them offering a basic pipeline for "standard x" for each of e.g. the top 20 languages (other than the awkward ones) would save a lot of effort over every project reinventing its own pipeline.
    - chriswarbo 3y ago
      That sounds more like papering over the cracks of legacy systems, introducing even more centralisation and power to a handful of unaccountable "hosters", and placing even more responsibilities on maintainers (who may be AWOL). - Cryptographically-verified, content-addressed storage (e.g. IPFS) is preferable to downloading random EXEs from "github and other code hosters". Indeed, for sources too! (I learned this lesson when Microsoft bought GitHub, and many projects jumped ship; that caused an outbreak of 404s for anything that was hard-coding github.com URLs!) - Rather than relying on someone else having produced opaque blobs for us, it's better for everyone to be capable of building things, if needed. Nix (and Guix) are good for this, since they're source-based, ensuring that the full build instructions are available (they will automatically download binaries, if available and signed by a trusted key; but the option of building ourselves is always there). This is also crucial if we want to validate those binaries for ourselves (I recall the "trustix" project is trying to crowd-source such validation too) - Another advantage of the Nix/Guix approach is that build instructions can be parameterised, e.g. by the source. This allows anyone to plug in any version of the code they like (whether a git commit, or a local folder, or an IPFS URL, etc.). Again, if someone else has already built that combination (and someone we trust has signed it) then their existing binary will be fetched. This sort of approach doesn't require any buy-in from hosting platforms, maintainers, DNS authorities, etc.
- _joel 3y ago
  I'd like software that connects to machine with write privileges, across network boundaries, to have some degree of maintenance, if that's ok. It may not be just security too, as this integrates FUSE and SSH then there will be bitrot and API drift etc over the years.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  The FUSE situation on Mac OS requires maintenance on the software or it will stop working.
saurik 3y ago
> The current maintainer continues to apply pull requests and makes regular releases, but unfortunately has no capacity to do any development beyond addressing high-impact issues. Assuming this is true--and I think it is fair to trust the author of the statement when judging the same author--this doesn't sound like a project that needs a fork, as it apparently in fact does have an active maintainer; if you want to help contribute to sshfs, you thereby can do that without forking it and causing a mess for everyone having to decide which one to use/ship and without the bad blood inherent in resorting to the four-letter F-word of open source project management.
- Macha 3y ago
  That's the old status before being orphaned. The latest note at the top of the readme in the original repo reads: > This project is no longer maintained or developed. Github issue tracking and pull requests have therefore been disabled. The mailing list (see below) is still available for use. > If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chrkl 3y ago
Unfortunately, this fork does not look very vivid. Last commit in March, almost not activity in terms of PRs and issues. I would not bet on it.
- deadbunny 3y ago
  What sort of activity level are you expecting from a stable project?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chaxor 3y ago
    People have a hard time orienting if coming from js, where a 'stable' project means refactoring the entire code base to keep up with the dependencies refactoring their apis every 2 months.
  - n3storm 3y ago
    plus, they are investigating old edgy errors in many issues, rescuing them (already closed) from the old project.
- dfc 3y ago
  Vivid?
  - bdsa 3y ago
    A fairly unidiomatic rendering of "lively", I think.
  - AnthonBerg 3y ago
    Definition 3: “Full of life, strikingly alive.” Etymology: “Borrowed from Latin vividus (“animated, spirited”), from vivere (“to live”), akin to vita (“life”), Ancient Greek βίος (bíos, “life”).” I like it! https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vivid https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vivid
- 3y ago
Timshel 3y ago
Discovered that you can replace sshfs with rclone. And the project appear to be way more active : https://github.com/rclone/rclone https://github.com/rclone/rclone Edit: cf: https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/
- synergy20 3y ago
  how so? rclone is more like scp to me only.
  - Timshel 3y ago
    Just edited a link to the doc ^^
  - mrshadowgoose 3y ago
    rclone has a "mount" command.
    - ape4 3y ago
      Sorry if this is documented (I did take a quick look). Does rclone mounted do whole file compression like rsync? I don't see how the file API would support this. eg fopen, write, close, etc
      - tredre3 3y ago
        In this scenario, rclone mount uses sftp in the background which compresses the entire stream (you can control that by passing args to the ssh command spawned by rclone) but it doesn't do it per-file. In practice I don't know if there is a difference.
  - lillecarl 3y ago
    https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/
  - elkhadiy 3y ago
thecosmicfrog 3y ago
The main file is a C file which is nearly 5,000 lines long. Impressive. https://github.com/deadbeefsociety/sshfs/blob/main/sshfs.c https://github.com/deadbeefsociety/sshfs/blob/main/sshfs.c
- _lvbh 3y ago
  Both impressive and scary
- redleader55 3y ago
  To me, 5000 lines of C is not impressive nor scary. Functions are pretty small, there are a lot of comments - everything seems like a normal unit with some complexity.
- the_duke 3y ago
  Well... check out QuickJS: the bulk of the code is in a single 55k LOC C file: https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c
- crabbone 3y ago
  This is nothing extraordinary. I don't know why this is a tradition, but this is a very typical situation for C projects.
  - unilynx 3y ago
    Compilation used to be slower, and one 5K line file would be noticeably faster than 10 500 line files, not to mention possibly having to build extra header files to connect them together. That would encourage larger files.
    - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. Computers used to be smaller, and had a hard time with very large files. Swapping out of limited RAM and so forth. Not fast. I think long files are solely caused by somebody incapable of software design at any level. They just keep typing and never think about structure or separation of duties or whatever. I recall the WindowsCE DHCP service was one large file. An enormous busted-ass straightline pile of garbage code that didn't handle most errors. Written by some intern. I re-wrote it for our platform and removed all the issues. Microsoft of course didn't want my code because, arrogance.
kiririn 3y ago
rclone mount is my go-to now for sshfs functionality - better performance, stability and caching options
- remram 3y ago
  rclone cannot write to the middle of a file though, without transferring the whole file. That is my main issue with it. Maybe sshfs has the same limitation though.
madacol 3y ago
Nautilus (Ubuntu's file explorer) allows to mount SFTP folders. Supposedly it uses `gvfs` under the hood. Note that SFTP uses an SSH connection for its file transfers, so I have not seen an UI difference from SSHFS
- rsync 3y ago
  It allows you to browse sftp endpoints in the nautilus GUI but does it simultaneously create a mount point in the file system that you could use in the terminal? I don’t remember…
  - ktpsns 3y ago
    gvfs has a bridge to fuse, cf. https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/gvfsd-fuse.1.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/gvfsd-fuse.... -- that means: Yes, you can use gvfs mounts natively in all other non-GNOME/GTK-applications running on your computer.
  - pantalaimon 3y ago
    > does it simultaneously create a mount point in the file system that you could use in the terminal? Yes it does. You can find it in /run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs/
  - chriswarbo 3y ago
    You can use the `gio mount` command to mount a given remote. It will appear as a folder in `/run/user/$UID/gvfs`. As an example, my phone has some systemd services which run `gio mount` for an SMB share and an SFTP share, when I'm connected to my home WiFi. I've got symlinks in my home folder to their associated gvfs directories, which become dangling when I'm not at home.
moontear 3y ago
How are the different packages for the different *nix distros maintained? I see the link to repology, but that service only tracks the packages - who created the packages and where are they generated in the repo?
jmclnx 3y ago
Interesting, I alaways assumed sshfs was part of OpenSSH, learn something new every day. Also, looks like sshfs used in Slackware is abandoned. https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs A quote from the link, I wonder if this project will be the 'one': >If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork. I also wonder if it was abandoned due to the RHEL re-orgs like what happened to bluetooth.
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  It does seem like a good fit for the maintainers of openssh. I too had thought it was key linux ssh infrastructure.
  - frutiger 3y ago
    > I too had thought it [OpenSSH] was key linux ssh infrastructure. As a side note, OpenSSH is quite independent of the Linux ecosystem. It is developed as part of OpenBSD. openssh-portable is provided as a standalone software package that is broadly POSIX-compliant.
    - jmclnx 3y ago
      >openssh-portable is provided as a standalone software package that is broadly POSIX-compliant. Yes, glad the OpenBSD folks do this. Linux people could learn a lot from OpenBSD Developers (looking directly at Wayland).
      - soraminazuki 3y ago
        I think Wayland is a different beast because unlike SSH, it involves the kernel.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    I kinda doubt it, SSH already have SFTP and SSHFS is .... quite honestly a tool that has no business existing. It's a neat trick but it's always going to be something that someone bolted on to a solution because they didn't want to deal with a proper file server. Part of the appeal might be that NFS (3 or 4, take your pick) is still the best we've been able to come up with and neither is really that great for basic installation. Still SSHFS is a mess to deal with in a production setup. Some of the messiest production systems I've de-tangled over years have frequently been relying on SSH and SSHFS to do stuff assumes a permanent connection.
zitterbewegung 3y ago
If you want something in user land and you don't mind emacs there is TRAMP “Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol”. https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ I use it a lot when I am accessing files from my server on my MacBook Pro .
- Zambyte 3y ago
  My favorite thing about using TRAMP is being able to cd to a directory on a remote system, and then cp a file either from my working directory to my local machine (or another remote!), or from my local machine to the current working directory. Before I started using TRAMP, my flow for this was: SSH to a remote system, locate where I want to copy a file to with cd + ls, kill my SSH session, and then scp or rsync the file over, and then usually SSH back into the system.
  - kpw94 3y ago
    > kill my SSH session, and then scp or rsync the file over, and then usually SSH back into the system. Naive question: why the need to kill the ssh session? Can't you just open another terminal window or tab (or tmux/screen tab if that's part of your workflow)
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      That's also a way to do it. I prefer TRAMP over both ways though.
    - jakobson14 3y ago
      Or just scp from the server, inside the same SSH session. scp works both ways.
    - shric 3y ago
      Not the GP, but I assume it's just because the ssh swssion is no longer needed -- it was only required to locate the file.
the-alchemist 3y ago
Anyone try rclone or sshfs on Mac OS X with macfuse/osxfuse?
- blue1 3y ago
  sshfs works (I use Monterey, M1), though it's slowish.
- binarymax 3y ago
  I use sshfs with macfuse on my M1, and mount a drive to a linux box in my office. It's mostly OK, but has its quirks. Getting it setup was a bit of an adventure, and I questioned myself a couple times - but I powered through and it worked out just fine.
- rsync 3y ago
  See my top level comment elsewhere… the answer is “mountain duck”.
- artificialLimbs 3y ago
  I use Macfuse to localfolder all of my servers. Works great. Have a little script for each server: mount_fooserver.sh: umount -f ~/mounts/fooserver sshfs -o kill_on_unmount,reconnect,allow_other,defer_permissions,direct_io username@server:/ ~/mounts/fooserver -ovolname=foo
  - dtgriscom 3y ago
    Interesting. I use > -o reconnect,cache=no,defer_permissions So, I add "cache=no"; and omit "kill_on_unmount", "allow_other" and "direct_io". Looks like "kill_on_remount" is a cleanup option; "allow_other" allows other users to mount the same drive (I don't need that) and "direct_io" is similar to "cache=no". FYI...
williamstein 3y ago
Related -- last month I wrote an implementation of something very similar to sshfs, but in Typescript over a WebSocket: https://github.com/sagemathinc/websocketfs https://github.com/sagemathinc/websocketfs
vmlinuz 3y ago
It's obviously a slightly different combination of technologies, but I've been using NFS over wireguard pretty happily for a while...
- chasil 3y ago
  NFS is more graceful in reconnecting when the TCP channel is reset, which is a great benefit. It also implements more filesystem functionality, as a "df" report will correctly reflect the remote filesystem's usage. EDIT: NFSv4 also offers "delegations," which give complete control of a file to a client in an expiring lease; the latest NFS clients also have "polite delegations," which tacitly extend the lease period. SSHFS is very handy for a "quick and dirty" mount, though, with minimal configuration.
- notpublic 3y ago
  +1 Switched from sshfs to NFSv4+wireguard few years back. Works great!
- Borg3 3y ago
  I myself went to other way around. While my VPN infra is very stable, I went into repo route. I use my very simple DVFS repo utility to sync files and never looked back. I like to have multiple copies of stuff here and there.
rsync 3y ago
A note … I have transitioned from years of macfuse + sshfs on Mac to just installing the excellent “mountain duck” tool which gives you finder and mount point access to an sftp endpoint. Very nice software and indispensable for me.
- ics 3y ago
  As a recently returned rsync.net customer, I was a bit surprised to peruse the docs and see that Fuse/sshfs is still up as a recommended option for Mac integration (see https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_sshfs.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_sshfs.html). A few months ago this led me down the path of trying ExpanDrive/StrongSync, but this is the first I've heard of Mountain Duck (love Cyberduck though). I'm looking forward to giving it a spin now but if it has been working well for you please consider updating this page for others. Happy customer otherwise!
- jmspring 3y ago
  Mountain Duck has been my goto as well. That said, for VSCode the Remote SSH extenion from Microsoft helps greatly in working with repositories on VMs and other remote machines. Libfuse / SSHFS for MacOS started becoming a real burden to try and use a ome years back and it lead me to mountain duck as well.
- mbirth 3y ago
  Just for the record: for macOS there’s now https://www.fuse-t.org/ https://www.fuse-t.org/ which works without a kext (by spawning a local NFS server in the background and having macOS connect to it) and also has a sshfs implementation listed on https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t/wiki#sample-filesystems https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t/wiki#sample-filesyste... .
  - concerned_ctzn 3y ago
    brew tap macos-fuse-t/homebrew-cask; brew install fuse-t-sshfs
qbane 3y ago
I think SFTP is a good but underrated protocol, when mirroring a file tree bidirectionally makes more sense than cloning one to another. Having forked and studied from SSHFS' code, I am currently maintaining a list of resources and some personal thoughts on https://hackmd.io/@q/sftp-over-ws https://hackmd.io/@q/sftp-over-ws.
- arthur2e5 3y ago
  SFTP is a major step up from FTP, but there's a lot of unrealized potential on the server side, so you can't just work on better clients. Both OpenSSH and the GNU lsh server only offer an old version of the protocol -- v2, I think. That oldness is intentional: https://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=168488976013498&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=168488976013498&w=2
dontcontactme 3y ago
sshfs is no longer maintained? That's sad, I used sshfs in school to be able to use my zillion vim plugins to edit code without having to install them all on the remote server we used for compute. I was surprised with how smooth of a system it was.
hot_gril 3y ago
I remember using SSHFS way back in the day on Mac, also back then thinking "SSHFS" meant "SSH + HFS." It was always confusing to grab the right tools for it, and it never worked very well. With remote codebases, I just SSH in and edit in Vim.
feldrim 3y ago
> This repository has been archived by the owner on May 26, 2022. It is now read-only. > This project is no longer maintained or developed. Github issue tracking and pull requests have therefore been disabled. The mailing list (see below) is still available for use. If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork. I saw that there are some semi-active forks focusing on different aspects: a rust rewrite, a persistent cache support version, or a bug fixing only version. The issue is that most software has bugs and vulnerabilities which has not been discovered yet while the software is not maintained. It means the problems will exist without a solution for the future. Open source software maintainers have been a significant part of our overall IT environment [0] but voluntary contributions are subject to human resource limits. SSHFS is one of those projects relying on a single maintainer which has ended up being archived. The packages on many distributions repositories are stuck as is. The several semi-active forks are also owned by a single person without a proper community. I'm not sure if any of the distro communities would pick one of those and package it to be the next version. So, the users of these software on their own, with the single, cross platform, ultimately portable packaging solution: the source code. 0. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- fyrabanks 3y ago
  I have nothing but respect for Nikolaus, and SSHFS is absolutely a cornerstone of IT, but if you think the original project was protecting you from vulnerabilities.. I have a bridge to sell you. I also don't really understand what your last sentence is getting at--I may be daft.
  - feldrim 3y ago
    It may be my bad wording. All I am saying is that an archived and unmaintained project leaves the option of fixing bugs and vulnerabilities out. The hope is lost with no effort of fixing. And this is inevitable with current open source models.
computersuck 3y ago
Is it google summer of code or some similar event right now? Looks like the most recent issues and PRs are just junk typo / grammar fixes
effie 3y ago
Is there a more security-oriented alternative to SSHFS, where the connecting client won't be given shell access on the server? I just want to share a directory from server to an untrusted VM over network, and have VM mount it, not give the VM shell access to the server. FTP is close to such a thing, but it is somewhat archaic, slow and not sure about its security.
- quoiquoi 3y ago
  If the user account is only supposed to have file transfer capabilities/no shell access, add it a to a specific group e.g. `sftponly`, and only allow this group to use the `internal-sftp` command in `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` Match Group sftponly ForceCommand internal-sftp -l INFO -f LOCAL6 AllowTcpForwarding no AllowAgentForwarding no GatewayPorts no X11Forwarding no
  - effie 3y ago
    Thank you, this seems to prevent client getting shell on the server, while allowing it to make SSHFS mounts. I've put /usr/sbin/nologin into client's row in /etc/passwd on the server as well (/dev/null would break everything including SSHFS). Is there some way to specify that nothing except internal-sftp is allowed, as opposed to setting each option explicitly to "no"? The latter way seems error-prone, one is bound to miss some obscure option there. And I wonder why do you suggest using the LOCAL6 log facility? In sftp-server, the default is AUTH...

329 points by feldrim 3y ago

blueflow 3y ago

Good, it seems people can't stand it if software just exists and does its job and doesn't get new commits each month.

londons_explore 3y ago
I mostly care if projects don't accept bugfixes. For example "inotify feature longer works with the latest glibc release due to subtle API change" might be an easy 10 line pull request to fix. But if the maintainer doesn't take the pull request and make a release, then the effort of fixing it is wasted, and every single user has to workaround/suffer from that bug into the future. There are loads of projects in that state - unmerged PR's from years ago with sensible fixes, no new release, and no forks that are distributed to users.
- Aachen 3y ago
  Not to mention this scenario except when it's a security patch that just needs to be applied and released
- londons_explore 3y ago
  I wish github and other code hosters made it easier to "just make a release". Next to the "Download zip" button on github, they should add a "Download built .deb" and "Download built .exe" - and those buttons should work on any fork, branch, PR, etc. And they should add all the necessary build infrastructure to achieve that. It turns out that at scale, build infrastructure is pretty cheap to run, since caching is so incredibly effective and there is only a need to rebuild a file once per (human) edit to a file or its dependencies.
  - _joel 3y ago
    Making a .deb isn't as simple as it might seem. If you want to use shared libraries, especially so. Which version of Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/... whatever are you targetting? You can tools like FPM[1] (which is awesome btw, used it for some great hacks in the past), but that won't make you .debs that are necessarily done to the debian guidelines but usable. There are a load os SaaS companies that do that allow you to make multiple targets though, so perhaps some integrations there would work. [1]https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Presumably some kind of Makefile or similar build automation config file would be in the repo to define which versions of which tools to use to do the build.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      the open build service (by suse) does that. are there others?
      - _joel 3y ago
        I'm certain there are more but I can only think of artifactory now and not sure that even makes the debs (does the repo stuff). Maybe there's a business plan somewhere in there :)
    - pnutjam 3y ago
      https://openbuildservice.org/help/manuals/obs-user-guide/cha.obs.build_process https://openbuildservice.org/help/manuals/obs-user-guide/cha...
  - pinusc 3y ago
    When making a github release, you can attach whatever file you want, including .exe and .deb. The problem is that building packages is kind of a nightmare, as there's at least one (or, as is the case far too often, many) build system for each programming language. Linux package management is also hard as each distro has its own way of packaging things. And you need a mac to produce macOS Applications... My point is, there is no way github could add a fully automatic "build and package this release" button. It would require tons of configuration (and trial and error...) from the user. But good news! If you _are_ willing to figure out how, you can make a github pipeline that compiles and packages your code (producing an "artifact"). Several projects I follow do exactly this. A complex problem like this essentially requires a bespoke solution, and to be fair github does give you tools to automate said solution. The problem is not the infrastructure but the complexity of build systems. I do agree there should be more ready-made pipelines to aid this process. When I tried to release a python program to work on linux, windows, and macOS, I quickly realized I wasn't interested in figuring out how to make a working pipeline (after spending a weekend getting it to build on each OS in the first place). But surely that's because python is particularly bad at package management... Well, most languages are particularly bad at it
    - lmm 3y ago
      Building packages is easy for most programming languages, it's only very old ones and Python that are bad. While I wouldn't expect GitHub to support every language, and many projects will need customization, them offering a basic pipeline for "standard x" for each of e.g. the top 20 languages (other than the awkward ones) would save a lot of effort over every project reinventing its own pipeline.
  - chriswarbo 3y ago
    That sounds more like papering over the cracks of legacy systems, introducing even more centralisation and power to a handful of unaccountable "hosters", and placing even more responsibilities on maintainers (who may be AWOL). - Cryptographically-verified, content-addressed storage (e.g. IPFS) is preferable to downloading random EXEs from "github and other code hosters". Indeed, for sources too! (I learned this lesson when Microsoft bought GitHub, and many projects jumped ship; that caused an outbreak of 404s for anything that was hard-coding github.com URLs!) - Rather than relying on someone else having produced opaque blobs for us, it's better for everyone to be capable of building things, if needed. Nix (and Guix) are good for this, since they're source-based, ensuring that the full build instructions are available (they will automatically download binaries, if available and signed by a trusted key; but the option of building ourselves is always there). This is also crucial if we want to validate those binaries for ourselves (I recall the "trustix" project is trying to crowd-source such validation too) - Another advantage of the Nix/Guix approach is that build instructions can be parameterised, e.g. by the source. This allows anyone to plug in any version of the code they like (whether a git commit, or a local folder, or an IPFS URL, etc.). Again, if someone else has already built that combination (and someone we trust has signed it) then their existing binary will be fetched. This sort of approach doesn't require any buy-in from hosting platforms, maintainers, DNS authorities, etc.
_joel 3y ago
I'd like software that connects to machine with write privileges, across network boundaries, to have some degree of maintenance, if that's ok. It may not be just security too, as this integrates FUSE and SSH then there will be bitrot and API drift etc over the years.
renewiltord 3y ago
The FUSE situation on Mac OS requires maintenance on the software or it will stop working.

saurik 3y ago

> The current maintainer continues to apply pull requests and makes regular releases, but unfortunately has no capacity to do any development beyond addressing high-impact issues. Assuming this is true--and I think it is fair to trust the author of the statement when judging the same author--this doesn't sound like a project that needs a fork, as it apparently in fact does have an active maintainer; if you want to help contribute to sshfs, you thereby can do that without forking it and causing a mess for everyone having to decide which one to use/ship and without the bad blood inherent in resorting to the four-letter F-word of open source project management.

Macha 3y ago
That's the old status before being orphaned. The latest note at the top of the readme in the original repo reads: > This project is no longer maintained or developed. Github issue tracking and pull requests have therefore been disabled. The mailing list (see below) is still available for use. > If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

chrkl 3y ago

Unfortunately, this fork does not look very vivid. Last commit in March, almost not activity in terms of PRs and issues. I would not bet on it.

deadbunny 3y ago
What sort of activity level are you expecting from a stable project?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chaxor 3y ago
  People have a hard time orienting if coming from js, where a 'stable' project means refactoring the entire code base to keep up with the dependencies refactoring their apis every 2 months.
- n3storm 3y ago
  plus, they are investigating old edgy errors in many issues, rescuing them (already closed) from the old project.
dfc 3y ago
Vivid?
- bdsa 3y ago
  A fairly unidiomatic rendering of "lively", I think.
- AnthonBerg 3y ago
  Definition 3: “Full of life, strikingly alive.” Etymology: “Borrowed from Latin vividus (“animated, spirited”), from vivere (“to live”), akin to vita (“life”), Ancient Greek βίος (bíos, “life”).” I like it! https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vivid https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/vivid
3y ago

Timshel 3y ago

Discovered that you can replace sshfs with rclone. And the project appear to be way more active : https://github.com/rclone/rclone https://github.com/rclone/rclone Edit: cf: https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/

synergy20 3y ago
how so? rclone is more like scp to me only.
- Timshel 3y ago
  Just edited a link to the doc ^^
- mrshadowgoose 3y ago
  rclone has a "mount" command.
  - ape4 3y ago
    Sorry if this is documented (I did take a quick look). Does rclone mounted do whole file compression like rsync? I don't see how the file API would support this. eg fopen, write, close, etc
    - tredre3 3y ago
      In this scenario, rclone mount uses sftp in the background which compresses the entire stream (you can control that by passing args to the ssh command spawned by rclone) but it doesn't do it per-file. In practice I don't know if there is a difference.
- lillecarl 3y ago
  https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/
- elkhadiy 3y ago

thecosmicfrog 3y ago

The main file is a C file which is nearly 5,000 lines long. Impressive. https://github.com/deadbeefsociety/sshfs/blob/main/sshfs.c https://github.com/deadbeefsociety/sshfs/blob/main/sshfs.c

_lvbh 3y ago
Both impressive and scary
redleader55 3y ago
To me, 5000 lines of C is not impressive nor scary. Functions are pretty small, there are a lot of comments - everything seems like a normal unit with some complexity.
the_duke 3y ago
Well... check out QuickJS: the bulk of the code is in a single 55k LOC C file: https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c
crabbone 3y ago
This is nothing extraordinary. I don't know why this is a tradition, but this is a very typical situation for C projects.
- unilynx 3y ago
  Compilation used to be slower, and one 5K line file would be noticeably faster than 10 500 line files, not to mention possibly having to build extra header files to connect them together. That would encourage larger files.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. Computers used to be smaller, and had a hard time with very large files. Swapping out of limited RAM and so forth. Not fast. I think long files are solely caused by somebody incapable of software design at any level. They just keep typing and never think about structure or separation of duties or whatever. I recall the WindowsCE DHCP service was one large file. An enormous busted-ass straightline pile of garbage code that didn't handle most errors. Written by some intern. I re-wrote it for our platform and removed all the issues. Microsoft of course didn't want my code because, arrogance.

kiririn 3y ago

rclone mount is my go-to now for sshfs functionality - better performance, stability and caching options

remram 3y ago
rclone cannot write to the middle of a file though, without transferring the whole file. That is my main issue with it. Maybe sshfs has the same limitation though.

madacol 3y ago

Nautilus (Ubuntu's file explorer) allows to mount SFTP folders. Supposedly it uses `gvfs` under the hood. Note that SFTP uses an SSH connection for its file transfers, so I have not seen an UI difference from SSHFS

rsync 3y ago
It allows you to browse sftp endpoints in the nautilus GUI but does it simultaneously create a mount point in the file system that you could use in the terminal? I don’t remember…
- ktpsns 3y ago
  gvfs has a bridge to fuse, cf. https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/gvfsd-fuse.1.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/gvfsd-fuse.... -- that means: Yes, you can use gvfs mounts natively in all other non-GNOME/GTK-applications running on your computer.
- pantalaimon 3y ago
  > does it simultaneously create a mount point in the file system that you could use in the terminal? Yes it does. You can find it in /run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs/
- chriswarbo 3y ago
  You can use the `gio mount` command to mount a given remote. It will appear as a folder in `/run/user/$UID/gvfs`. As an example, my phone has some systemd services which run `gio mount` for an SMB share and an SFTP share, when I'm connected to my home WiFi. I've got symlinks in my home folder to their associated gvfs directories, which become dangling when I'm not at home.

moontear 3y ago

How are the different packages for the different *nix distros maintained? I see the link to repology, but that service only tracks the packages - who created the packages and where are they generated in the repo?

jmclnx 3y ago

Interesting, I alaways assumed sshfs was part of OpenSSH, learn something new every day. Also, looks like sshfs used in Slackware is abandoned. https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs A quote from the link, I wonder if this project will be the 'one': >If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork. I also wonder if it was abandoned due to the RHEL re-orgs like what happened to bluetooth.

SubiculumCode 3y ago
It does seem like a good fit for the maintainers of openssh. I too had thought it was key linux ssh infrastructure.
- frutiger 3y ago
  > I too had thought it [OpenSSH] was key linux ssh infrastructure. As a side note, OpenSSH is quite independent of the Linux ecosystem. It is developed as part of OpenBSD. openssh-portable is provided as a standalone software package that is broadly POSIX-compliant.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    >openssh-portable is provided as a standalone software package that is broadly POSIX-compliant. Yes, glad the OpenBSD folks do this. Linux people could learn a lot from OpenBSD Developers (looking directly at Wayland).
    - soraminazuki 3y ago
      I think Wayland is a different beast because unlike SSH, it involves the kernel.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  I kinda doubt it, SSH already have SFTP and SSHFS is .... quite honestly a tool that has no business existing. It's a neat trick but it's always going to be something that someone bolted on to a solution because they didn't want to deal with a proper file server. Part of the appeal might be that NFS (3 or 4, take your pick) is still the best we've been able to come up with and neither is really that great for basic installation. Still SSHFS is a mess to deal with in a production setup. Some of the messiest production systems I've de-tangled over years have frequently been relying on SSH and SSHFS to do stuff assumes a permanent connection.

zitterbewegung 3y ago

If you want something in user land and you don't mind emacs there is TRAMP “Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol”. https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ I use it a lot when I am accessing files from my server on my MacBook Pro .

Zambyte 3y ago
My favorite thing about using TRAMP is being able to cd to a directory on a remote system, and then cp a file either from my working directory to my local machine (or another remote!), or from my local machine to the current working directory. Before I started using TRAMP, my flow for this was: SSH to a remote system, locate where I want to copy a file to with cd + ls, kill my SSH session, and then scp or rsync the file over, and then usually SSH back into the system.
- kpw94 3y ago
  > kill my SSH session, and then scp or rsync the file over, and then usually SSH back into the system. Naive question: why the need to kill the ssh session? Can't you just open another terminal window or tab (or tmux/screen tab if that's part of your workflow)
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    That's also a way to do it. I prefer TRAMP over both ways though.
  - jakobson14 3y ago
    Or just scp from the server, inside the same SSH session. scp works both ways.
  - shric 3y ago
    Not the GP, but I assume it's just because the ssh swssion is no longer needed -- it was only required to locate the file.

the-alchemist 3y ago

Anyone try rclone or sshfs on Mac OS X with macfuse/osxfuse?

blue1 3y ago
sshfs works (I use Monterey, M1), though it's slowish.
binarymax 3y ago
I use sshfs with macfuse on my M1, and mount a drive to a linux box in my office. It's mostly OK, but has its quirks. Getting it setup was a bit of an adventure, and I questioned myself a couple times - but I powered through and it worked out just fine.
rsync 3y ago
See my top level comment elsewhere… the answer is “mountain duck”.
artificialLimbs 3y ago
I use Macfuse to localfolder all of my servers. Works great. Have a little script for each server: mount_fooserver.sh: umount -f ~/mounts/fooserver sshfs -o kill_on_unmount,reconnect,allow_other,defer_permissions,direct_io username@server:/ ~/mounts/fooserver -ovolname=foo
- dtgriscom 3y ago
  Interesting. I use > -o reconnect,cache=no,defer_permissions So, I add "cache=no"; and omit "kill_on_unmount", "allow_other" and "direct_io". Looks like "kill_on_remount" is a cleanup option; "allow_other" allows other users to mount the same drive (I don't need that) and "direct_io" is similar to "cache=no". FYI...

williamstein 3y ago

Related -- last month I wrote an implementation of something very similar to sshfs, but in Typescript over a WebSocket: https://github.com/sagemathinc/websocketfs https://github.com/sagemathinc/websocketfs

vmlinuz 3y ago

It's obviously a slightly different combination of technologies, but I've been using NFS over wireguard pretty happily for a while...

chasil 3y ago
NFS is more graceful in reconnecting when the TCP channel is reset, which is a great benefit. It also implements more filesystem functionality, as a "df" report will correctly reflect the remote filesystem's usage. EDIT: NFSv4 also offers "delegations," which give complete control of a file to a client in an expiring lease; the latest NFS clients also have "polite delegations," which tacitly extend the lease period. SSHFS is very handy for a "quick and dirty" mount, though, with minimal configuration.
notpublic 3y ago
+1 Switched from sshfs to NFSv4+wireguard few years back. Works great!
Borg3 3y ago
I myself went to other way around. While my VPN infra is very stable, I went into repo route. I use my very simple DVFS repo utility to sync files and never looked back. I like to have multiple copies of stuff here and there.

rsync 3y ago

A note … I have transitioned from years of macfuse + sshfs on Mac to just installing the excellent “mountain duck” tool which gives you finder and mount point access to an sftp endpoint. Very nice software and indispensable for me.

ics 3y ago
As a recently returned rsync.net customer, I was a bit surprised to peruse the docs and see that Fuse/sshfs is still up as a recommended option for Mac integration (see https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_sshfs.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_sshfs.html). A few months ago this led me down the path of trying ExpanDrive/StrongSync, but this is the first I've heard of Mountain Duck (love Cyberduck though). I'm looking forward to giving it a spin now but if it has been working well for you please consider updating this page for others. Happy customer otherwise!
jmspring 3y ago
Mountain Duck has been my goto as well. That said, for VSCode the Remote SSH extenion from Microsoft helps greatly in working with repositories on VMs and other remote machines. Libfuse / SSHFS for MacOS started becoming a real burden to try and use a ome years back and it lead me to mountain duck as well.
mbirth 3y ago
Just for the record: for macOS there’s now https://www.fuse-t.org/ https://www.fuse-t.org/ which works without a kext (by spawning a local NFS server in the background and having macOS connect to it) and also has a sshfs implementation listed on https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t/wiki#sample-filesystems https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t/wiki#sample-filesyste... .
- concerned_ctzn 3y ago
  brew tap macos-fuse-t/homebrew-cask; brew install fuse-t-sshfs

qbane 3y ago

I think SFTP is a good but underrated protocol, when mirroring a file tree bidirectionally makes more sense than cloning one to another. Having forked and studied from SSHFS' code, I am currently maintaining a list of resources and some personal thoughts on https://hackmd.io/@q/sftp-over-ws https://hackmd.io/@q/sftp-over-ws.

arthur2e5 3y ago
SFTP is a major step up from FTP, but there's a lot of unrealized potential on the server side, so you can't just work on better clients. Both OpenSSH and the GNU lsh server only offer an old version of the protocol -- v2, I think. That oldness is intentional: https://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=168488976013498&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=168488976013498&w=2

dontcontactme 3y ago

sshfs is no longer maintained? That's sad, I used sshfs in school to be able to use my zillion vim plugins to edit code without having to install them all on the remote server we used for compute. I was surprised with how smooth of a system it was.

hot_gril 3y ago

I remember using SSHFS way back in the day on Mac, also back then thinking "SSHFS" meant "SSH + HFS." It was always confusing to grab the right tools for it, and it never worked very well. With remote codebases, I just SSH in and edit in Vim.

feldrim 3y ago

> This repository has been archived by the owner on May 26, 2022. It is now read-only. > This project is no longer maintained or developed. Github issue tracking and pull requests have therefore been disabled. The mailing list (see below) is still available for use. If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork. I saw that there are some semi-active forks focusing on different aspects: a rust rewrite, a persistent cache support version, or a bug fixing only version. The issue is that most software has bugs and vulnerabilities which has not been discovered yet while the software is not maintained. It means the problems will exist without a solution for the future. Open source software maintainers have been a significant part of our overall IT environment [0] but voluntary contributions are subject to human resource limits. SSHFS is one of those projects relying on a single maintainer which has ended up being archived. The packages on many distributions repositories are stuck as is. The several semi-active forks are also owned by a single person without a proper community. I'm not sure if any of the distro communities would pick one of those and package it to be the next version. So, the users of these software on their own, with the single, cross platform, ultimately portable packaging solution: the source code. 0. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

fyrabanks 3y ago
I have nothing but respect for Nikolaus, and SSHFS is absolutely a cornerstone of IT, but if you think the original project was protecting you from vulnerabilities.. I have a bridge to sell you. I also don't really understand what your last sentence is getting at--I may be daft.
- feldrim 3y ago
  It may be my bad wording. All I am saying is that an archived and unmaintained project leaves the option of fixing bugs and vulnerabilities out. The hope is lost with no effort of fixing. And this is inevitable with current open source models.

computersuck 3y ago

Is it google summer of code or some similar event right now? Looks like the most recent issues and PRs are just junk typo / grammar fixes

effie 3y ago

Is there a more security-oriented alternative to SSHFS, where the connecting client won't be given shell access on the server? I just want to share a directory from server to an untrusted VM over network, and have VM mount it, not give the VM shell access to the server. FTP is close to such a thing, but it is somewhat archaic, slow and not sure about its security.

quoiquoi 3y ago
If the user account is only supposed to have file transfer capabilities/no shell access, add it a to a specific group e.g. `sftponly`, and only allow this group to use the `internal-sftp` command in `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` Match Group sftponly ForceCommand internal-sftp -l INFO -f LOCAL6 AllowTcpForwarding no AllowAgentForwarding no GatewayPorts no X11Forwarding no
- effie 3y ago
  Thank you, this seems to prevent client getting shell on the server, while allowing it to make SSHFS mounts. I've put /usr/sbin/nologin into client's row in /etc/passwd on the server as well (/dev/null would break everything including SSHFS). Is there some way to specify that nothing except internal-sftp is allowed, as opposed to setting each option explicitly to "no"? The latter way seems error-prone, one is bound to miss some obscure option there. And I wonder why do you suggest using the LOCAL6 log facility? In sftp-server, the default is AUTH...