This past weekend, I finally got SSHFS set up across my home LAN. I typically have four terminals open, with one containing a screen session for my local computer (my laptop), while the other three contain screen sessions in various remote hosts - usually my web host, the Dell server, and my desktop.

I'm usually either scp and rsyincing files back and forth, or editing files in emacs directly on the remote computer. Of course, in a situation like that, it'd make a lot more sense to use something like SSHFS so I could treat files as local files, but I was never able to get SSHFS working. I'd install and modprobe FUSE, but whenever I tried to mount it, ls -l would show only question marks in the size & permissions boxes. It was frustrating, to say the least.

I gave another crack at it this weekend, which gave the same results - until I put the full path name instead of a tilde in the mount directive. So, instead of running sshfs 192.168.(desktop ip):~/ ~/desktop, I ran sshfs 192.168.(desktop ip):/home/adam/ ~/desktop. And just like that, it worked.

Which is nice. In particular, I keep ripped CD's in FLAC format on my desktop, but don't want to lug about gigs of music most the the time, so SSHFS is working just fine for listening to music over the network. It's even fast enough for video. Of course, since it transparently 'appears' to be a filesystem, my usermode programs don't care that it's over the network; I can cp & mv files across the network as if they were local files. And, of course, I don't have to go through the trouble of setting up an NFS or Samba share for each directory I want to share, which may well be impossible in shared hosting environments. Well, I actually haven't gotten it working on my shared hosting yet, but I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is. On the shared host, my home directory isn't actually /home/username, it's /home/.someFileServerName/username; the "real" directory is symlinked to that. I think it's simply a matter of trying to mount the full, non-symlinked directory name, but I'll have to try that later today.

I also set up an unrelated Samba network for my LAN over the weekend. The main reason is I actually wanted to start scanning my old handwritten things en-masse, but the scanner/printer was being appropriated by the Windows users of the house. I 'liberated' it right back, and set up Samba to share it across the LAN; now the unenlightened can use the printer (and a fileshare) in tandem with my scanning. The scanning works pretty well; the one gotcha is that scanimage has to be run in root mode (why, I'm not sure). Combined with some OCR programs, I'm hoping to get my old school assignments digitized once and for all. Although, the OCR results weren't so great last time around. We'll see.

So now I'm listening to an old Rammstein CD I didn't remember I had, stored on the desktop, but playing as a local file in mplayer. The world, today, is good.