Mount a Remote File System like its Local (Mac)
A great post over at lifehacker.com shows how to take some open source code that Google ported to the Mac which allows you to mount a remote file system right on your desktop as if it were a local drive. Basically the software suite uses MacFusion and MacFuse to enable this feature set. Once installed you can mount both FTP and SSH shares as if they were local. And the cost is right too! ($0.00)
Why is this so cool? Well you could always mount FTP shares using Mac OS in the finder. But the FTP shares were always read-only. This software lets you do read/write :-) Good thing #1 :-) With that said, my experience shows that SSH is a much better performer and is also secure because the session is encrypted to the host. So if you can do SSH, use that.
Why would you want to do this? Well a couple of reasons…
1) I have a web hosting account for carlhutzler.com. I have SSH access to it. Using MacFuse I can mount the share and drag and drop files to update my site. Of course I can also use an FTP client, but this is easier and more convenient in many ways.
2) I can SSH back to my home network server on my cable modem and mount my Music/iTunes share over the internet and hear my music since I don’t have enough HDD space on my laptop to carry music around with me. Here SSH is a real enabling technology as FTP (even via MacFuse) is not sufficient to stream music, browse the music through iTunes, etc.
I am sure there are many other uses and likely more geeky ones. Enjoy :-)
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Hi Carl! My sister Keenan and I were sent the link to your Madeira photos from her performance the other day, and we were wondering how to purchase photos, because there are so many we are dying to get from you. And also, once we buy these photos, do they come on a disk, or how would we recieve them. You really took some gorgeous photos, we spent ages going through those archives!
thanks,
Courtney
I’ve been using MacFUSE for about a month, and it has entirely changed the way I perform a whole bunch of regular tasks.
Not sure if lifehacker included this, but there’s another app called MacFusion which gives you a nice menu-bar icon with a drop-down menu of your favorite SSH or FTP filesystems — faster than using the sshfs app.
Yes. Indeed they do and that was what I thought made it all so convenient. :-) Now I can either VPN into my network (I flashed an old linksys with the dd-wrt firmware and it is now a VPN server too) or I can SSH directly to the server. Pretty flexible solution. I guess I only really need one or the other, but I guess fun to have both.