Mounting SFTP and FTP shares

This article deals with Filesystem in USErspace (FUSE) and (CurlFtpFS). The first enables the user to mount all kinds of filesystems (including SSH and FTP) at a local mountpoint. CurlFtpFS is a filesystem for acessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.

Installing and using FUSE
Make sure you have Filesystem in Userspace support enabled in your kernel:

Both, sshfs and CurlFTPFS, have FUSE as dependency. It is easy in installation. Simply: Then: and make sure fuse is in modules.autoload:

Mounting SFTP shares
To mount a remote host's file system through SSH at a local mount point, all you have to do is type:

To allow access to mountpoint for non-root users simply execute:

If your local user is into the group disk (on gentoo; other distributions can use another group, i.e. you must use the group fuse on Ubuntu), he/she can use sshfs directly. First add the local user in the group disk:

and mount the remote file system:

As example, if you want to mount the home directory of the user alian of the remote machine alian on $HOME/RemoteFS:

To unmount a remote host's file system type:

For that to work, you must have sshd running on the remote machine. If this remote machine is running gentoo, this is as easy than installing sshd:

and running it with its default configuration:

To start sshd at bootup:

Mount and Unmounting FTP shares
Installing CurlFtpFS:

CurlFtpFS uses typical FTP syntax:

To unmount an ftp host:

A better way is use and. To do this the following lines need to be added to :

The first line allows to work, the second  to work. Additional options are:

User and password : ftp://user:password@ftp.gentoo.org/

Specific port : ftp://ftp.gentoo.org:8585

Now, you should be able to:

and

Automounting
Automounting is an even better method. The following is a setup for automounting removable media on an Xterminal. On the terminal

So, it sets up the automounts in FTP's home. Establish FTP and test the automounting by FTPing to the Xterminal's FTP server.

On the application server

Automount won't understand fstype=curl without the following files: