For some time now, many of us around MIT have noticed just how awesome sshfs is. It gives a totally lightweight way to access the remote filesystem of any machine you have ssh to, without requiring any extra setup on the host. I’ve been running for at least a year now with my /data RAID on my server sshfs-mounted on my laptop, and it works totally great.

Recently, I came across two awesome things that make sshfs even neater. The first is the ServerAliveInterval ssh configuration option. I (and many others) had noticed that if you changed IP addresses (which happens all the time with our laptops), sshfs will just kinda hang there, and so will anything that tries to access anything in the ssfs-mounted filesystem. sshfs has a -o reconnect option that makes it automatically reconnect the underlying ssh if it dies, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the ssh hanging forever. The solution, it turns out, is the ServerAliveInterval config option. Just add

Host *
ServerAliveInterval 15

to .ssh/config, and ssh will send in-protocol keepalives every 15 seconds if the connection is idle, and die if it doesn’t receive anything back. Combine this with -o reconnect, and everything Just Works when you change IPs

The second cool thing is afuse, the FUSE automounter. It lets you set up an automounter for just about anything you can think of, using another FUSE filesystem itself. I simply run it as

afuse -o mount_template='sshfs -o reconnect %r:/ %m' -o unmount_template='fusermount -u -z %m' /ssh

from my .xsession, and I have a /ssh automounter! Combined with the wonders of kerberos and public keys, so I never have to type a password, and I can get easy remote access to just about every machine I care about!

(Note that I did have to chown /ssh to me in order for me to be able to run afuse as me, which is necessary for sshfs to access my kerberos tickets and ssh keys. This is fine for my laptop, but obviously wouldn’t work for a dialup or other multi-user machine.)