All I needed is to access my home directory hosted on a server quickly on a secure channel. FTP/Web based access were bit irritating as I could not read some of the IRC logs stored in unicode with ease. I quickly thought of installing and mounting the remote direct via sshfs (Secure Shell File System). Cool.. It just works.

To install it on my ubuntu box I used aptitude as follows

#sudo aptitude install sshfs

Once its done, all I need to do is to provide the remote hostname, directory to be mounted and the destination directory as the mount point. Check the syntax below.

#sshfs <username>@servername/ip:/home/<username> <destination>

This will prompt you for the SSH password. Once you’re authenticated, you will be able to access the files easily just like a normal folder. Its so convenient over FTP. Try it out today.

From man page: SSHFS (Secure  Shell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux (and other operating systems with a FUSE implementation, such as Mac OS X or FreeBSD) capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login on the remote computer. On the local computer where  the  SSHFS is  mounted,  the  implementation makes use of the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) kernel module. The practical effect of this is that the end user can seamlessly interact with remote files being securely served over SSH just as if they were local files on his/her computer. On the remote  computer the SFTP subsystem of SSH is used.