Centralized Storage via SFTP

For quite a while, I’ve been planning on centralizing a lot of my personal storage (documents, miscellaneous stuff) on one machine at home. The biggest problem that I have is that, while a VPN would be a good solution for my apartment (if I could get IPcopto do VPN between two dynamic IPs), it doesn’t really work for my mobile life. My laptop is often connected to untrusted wireless, and unknown firewall configurations, so VPN isn’t always the best (and definitely not the easiest) option. Given road warrior use, NFS is obviously out of the question.

After a little searching, I found the SSHFS module for FUSE, which allows userspace mounting of a SFTP filesystem. Despite some initial hiccups, I managed to get it setup on two machines - my laptop and a desktop in the apartment. This week I’ll finish working on the rest of the machines - and eventually replace my aging SSH gateway machine (currently a 10-year-old Gateway mini tower) with a Soekris box.

The setup was pretty easy:

1. Make sure you have public key authentication setup for ssh between the machines, using RSA keys.
2. Make sure fuse, libfuse, and the related packages are installed.
3. Install the sshfs package.
4. Make sure your user is added to the “trusted” group (for OpenSuSE).

After that, just give it a spin, as the user that you want to mount the filesystem as:

sshfs hostname:/path/to/mount /path/to/local/mountpoint

Once that worked pefectly, I added the following to my .bash_profile:

# this handles SSHFS mount of the central-home dir
if [ -a /path/to/local/mountpoint ]; then
    echo "HOSTNAME home is mounted at /path/to/local/mountpoint"
else
    echo "Mounting HOSTNAME home at /path/to/local/mountpoint..."
    hostname:/path/to/mount /path/to/local/mountpoint`  
fi