SSHFS

SSHFS

SSHFS allows you to mount a portion or all of your home directory from our servers to your local machine or to mount a portion of your local machines file system in your home directory on our servers.

Please note that while Ubuntu is used as an example, you can use any of our shells servers.

SSHFS requires a machine with ssh installed and the fuse file system installed. If you install sshfs, it will install the necessary requirements:

Debian based systems: apt-get install sshfs

RedHat based systems: yum install sshfs

Suse Systems: zypper install sshfs

For MacOS, you can get Fuse and SHFS (does same as SSHFS for Mac) at https://sourceforge.net/projects/osxfuse/.

For Windows: https://win-sshfs.googlecode.com/files/win-sshfs-0.0.1.5-setup.exe

For example, let’s say you wish to work on your website and edit on your home machine. You’d like the changes you make to be immediate rather than having to sync the changes using FTP after you are done.

To do this, on your local machine in a terminal window type:

sshfs user@ubuntu.eskimo.com:/home/user/public_html public_html

Substitute “user” for whatever your actual login is. You should be able to use any of our shell servers but it is known to work on ubuntu. It will prompt for password. After the password is successfully entered, public_html on your local machine will be the same as public_html on the ubuntu server and any changes you make will be immediately reflected there.

When you are done and wish to unmount the file system type:

fusermount -u public_html

This is whatever directory you specified when you mounted the file system. You can even mount your entire home directory this way.

It is possible to do the opposite and mount directories from your home machine onto Eskimo’s server If your machine listens to ssh connections and either has a static IP or you at least know the IP address at the time.

To mount a directory from your machine on to one of our servers, first ssh into our servers or come in with x2go, then use the same syntax substituting your machine’s name or IP address for ubuntu and your username on your machine to login.

Be sure to unmount when you are done.

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