The Site With the Lamp

July 25, 2008

Thought I would play around with SSHFS, which allows you to mount a folder on a remote computer locally using SSH. Obviously that would be much more convenient than using SFTP and would be a hell-ova-lot safer than using No File System (NFS). Getting started with it on Debian, though wasn't quite so easy.

When trying to use sshfs to mount a remote directory, i get this error:
fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

Apparently it's because I am not a member of the fuser group. I promptly added myself. Still no luck. logged out of the terminal and opened a new one, to see if getting the profile re-read will do the trick. It does but you run into another error.

fusermount: failed to open /dev/fuse: No such file or directory

Then I heard that fuse module needs to be loaded. So I tried the usual modprobe:

sudo modprobe fuse

I still get the same error and I still don't see the /dev/fuse file. I reckoned these profiles on debian are badly messed up. Certainly it seems to completely ignore my /etc/profile and .bash_profile files. So I changed into root once again with su and then gave the modprobe command from there. Lo and Behold. The darned module was loaded and the remote file system was mounted.

Finally we are getting there. Debian sure has strange ways of doing things.