townx

I like the way in Gnome/Nautilus you can create a "pseudo filesystem" over an SSH session: you can treat a remote filesystem sort of like part of your regular filesystem. However, it's not a real mount, as you can't reference it using a standard path (there's no /media/remote path you can point to from the command line, for example).

I was facing this with a client this morning, where we wanted to make a filesystem mountable via an SSH session. After a quick google, we found shfs. This enables mounting a filesystem which is accessible via an SSH session on a mount point on the local machine. We then found a simple installation guide and had it up and running in about 10 minutes. On Ubuntu Dapper, here's an overview of the process:

1. Get root
2. apt-get build-essential shfs-source shfs-utils linux-headers-`uname -r`
   (this installs everything you need to compile it up for your architecture; you may need to enable the Universe and Multiverse repositories)
3. module-assistant build shfs
4. module-assistant install shfs
5. To mount a directory over SSH:
   1. Create a directory on the local machine (e.g. remote)
   2. Run this command: shfsmount --persistent user@server.com /path/to/mount/onto
      (the --persistent flag maintains the connection in the event of temporary outages at the server end causing breaks in the SSH session)
6. To ensure the shfs module is loaded during boot:
   echo 'shfs' >> /etc/modules
7. To mount the filesystem automatically at boot time, add a line like this to /etc/fstab:
   user@server.com /path/to/mount/onto shfs
8. If you mount onto a directory inside /media, it will pop up as an icon on your desktop too.

We needed to set a few permissions to finish up; here's where I'm at so far in /etc/fstab:

user@server.com /media/ssh shfs rmode=755,auto,rw,group,cmd-user=ell,type=shell,stable,user,uid=1000,gid=100 0 0

This is useful as it logs into my remote machine using my personal public key, and sets the user and group to my user account and the users group. I'm still having a few issues with writing into the root of the mounted directory from Nautilus (I can from the command line, though).

We then explored whether tools like "TortoiseSVN": are available for Linux. EasyEclipse is great, but a bit heavyweight for some users; perhaps a simple Explorer-like interface which allows visual diffs will do. Enter Meld. It's packaged for Debian/Ubuntu, so you can do:

I hadn't looked at it for a while, and when I last looked it was quite simple and only did file-file comparisons. But the latest version is really cool. You can use it like a Subversion client and do visual comparisons of a local working copy and a repository without much fuss. I plan to look at this a bit more as it could be a great tool for companies who don't want to go as far as Subversion (you can do directory-directory comparisons too). Couple with shfs, it could be a great lightweight "revision control" system for Linux.