I Love My MacBook : MacFUSE

I just wanted to share with you another cool tool that I’ve been using: MacFuse and SSHFS.

With this very neat program, you can use SSH as a means to mount a remote filesystem.  In a lot of circumstances, the only way  you might have to access another machine is via SSH.  There are native tools on OS X (Tiger and Leopard) to copy files from one system to another.  Native command line tools like ftp and scp are among them.  Of course, those tools don’t allow you to integrate a remote filesystem into the current one on your machine in a seamless fashion.

With MacFUSE, you can do this.  Essentially, FUSE is a mechanism for implementing filesystems as user programs.  A user program runs and presents some view of a collection of data as a navigable filesystem to the host machine.  MacFUSE is the port of this tool to OS X.

My only experience with MacFUSE has been using it with a companion tool called SSHFS.  SSHFS allows you to mount a remote filesystem via SSH and use it as a local one.  It looks like a shared drive to your machine.  SSHFS, thus, is a user-space implementation of a filesystem using FUSE.

What does this get you?  Well…you can log into your home directory on nice.fas.harvard.edu and work on the files as if they were resident on your computer.  Pretty neat, eh?

The one caveat is that it can be a bit slow.  Of course, if you have no other way to access a file but manually copying it over via FTP or SCP, then the wait isn’t much of a big deal.  The nice thing is that a lot of systems provide incoming SSH session support.  If you’re handy with home servers (running OS X, Linux, or BSD)  and firewall port forwarding, you can use this tool to mount your home filesystems in a secure fashion.  No need to setup a VPN; this tool will handle it with SSH.  I’ve used it to mount my home directories when I’m on the road from WiFi in a hotel.

Give it a try!