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Experiences and Thoughts on SHFS?

Posted by Cliff on from the ssh-based-fileshares dept.

eugene ts wong asks: "I was looking over SHFS, & I thought that this seems like a very good software package. If I understand it correctly, then it should be the defacto way to mount shares across a network. I never heard of it till today, though. What do all of you think of this? What kinds of experiences do you have? I am interested in hearing some of your stories. I heard that NFS isn't secure. How do they both compare? Would you recommend SHFS for small, medium & large businesses?"

5 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. tried it by Satai · · Score: 4, Informative

    I tried it, and I found it to be a bit unreliable. This was last fall... Random accesses on files were slow, and frequently it hung, leaving me with orphaned partitions I couldn't umount. Otherwise it worked ok -- I mean, it was easy to configure and whatnot, but performance wise when I tried it it was found lacking.

  2. 3 week experience. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have been using shfs for a few weeks now, and here are the pros and cons with my limited experience with it.

    Pros:
    (i) mounting remote filesystems over ssh is great, as you don't have to worry about opening up new ports.
    (ii) read-only performance is good (I haven't had any problems).

    Cons:
    (i) definitely *buggy* (do not even think of using this for mounting partitions w/ critical data). For e.g., I mounted it read-only and by mistake opened a file with vim. When I tried to !wq, vim refused to write (obviously!), and I just escaped with a q!. Much to my chagrin, the file was gone--- I later figured that this was not a random bug; it was repeatable.
    (ii) write performance (across a 1Mbps DSL conn.) *sucks*!

  3. Tried it and now using FISH by wan-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    I tried using shfs but it didn't work very well (YMMV, I'm running a Gentoo 2.6.3 kernel) with my system. Frequent timeouts and the program had problems unmounting shfs mounts. I recently switched to using the "FISH" feature in KDE (fish://username@host/path_to_stuff/) and that has worked fairly well for my purposes.

  4. Re:LUFS by jefu · · Score: 3, Informative
    I've been using lufs across several machines (mostly for the sshfs filesystem) for a bit now with good results - a couple problems (keeping dates in sync for make has been a problem), but nothing insurmountable.

    Easy install, easy to use. Good stuff.

  5. Try NFSv4, or you could tunnel samba over ssh by danpritts · · Score: 3, Informative

    I am not familiar with shfs other than a brief read of the website and this thread.

    w/r/t NFS security, NFSv4 should solve most if not
    all of the problems. Fundamentally two things always bothered me about NFS security.

    RPC - NFS makes heavy use of sun-style RPC, requiring you to use the RPC libraries and the portmapper. This stuff has a bad reputation for security problems, eg, buffer overflows, and there is a lot of it, and it runs on random ports so it's difficult to filter/firewall/tunnel it.

    no user credentials - NFS through V3 doesn't provide any user credentials - root on the client has access to all users' files on the mounted filesystem. There's no server-enforced security.

    NFSv4 fixes the RPC/multiple ports problem.
    I don't know about the user credential problem but i bet it fixes that too.

    On to the quick-and-dirty:
    In the past, I've set up a samba server and used the linux smbfs client to access it, and tunneled the whole business over SSH. It worked reliably, to the limited extent that i tested it (YMMV).
    I don't really remember how well it performed - it was more of a proof-of-concept for me.