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Experiences and Thoughts on SHFS?
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?"
or more to the point why do you think its secure ?
it all comes down to trust...
do you trust the network your pluged into ?
how about the people who are selling that VPN ?
I surgest that you have a look at IPSec
it works on winXP linux solaris BSD's and then find a Networked File System that is high performance
regards
John Jones
I wanted a transparent way to access my remote files over SSH since it's the only external access I trust and came upon SHFS a couple of weeks ago.
.ko module built for 2.6 that the install process copies to you lib/modules directory didn't work. There was however a .o as well built for 2.6 that worked great after I copied it manually.
It has worked out really nice and I now don't have to do the scp or SFTP dance all of the time to edit files on a remote box.
One thing I came across though during "make install" under 2.6 is that the
i had the same results more than a year ago. Eventually I settled on emacs + tramp which does a suitable job of allowing me to edit remote files over SSH with little pain.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
sounds a lot like LUFS ( http://lufs.sf.net ) which lets you mount remote filesystems via SSH, FTP, and several other novel protocols.
If you're not forced to do so, change it to sftp://. It is a much better solution if your ssh target has an sftp backend. FISH uses basic shell tools at the remote, like shfs, and that's just too much complexity to be a good solution.
That's really too bad. I tried shfs probably at least 3 years ago or so. I had similar problems. I tried reporting bugs about it, went back and forth a bit, trying new versions as new versions came out with supposed fixes which never quite resolved it. I eventually just lost interest and ended up using something else. There were also some permission problems, it's been awhile now, I can't remember exactly what the problem was but I remember being very frustrated and losing data. (test data mind you). It was also suggested not to "push it" opening too many files at once, another stipulation that made it useless to me. What's pushing it, accessing 2 files at once? 3? 4?
Actually, it was ftpfs and then lufs that I used. Sounds like they have or had similar problems.
i have been using it for months at home. works great on the home wireless network. well, up until i switched to using my 15" powerbook.
despite being quite excited about the possibilities, i'd never run this in a production environment. alot of people run down nfs for being insecure and sucky on any number of levels. i have to say, we had a very active messaging system behind a very high profile website use nfs for two years due to a combination of stupid developers and vendor going out of business. it NEVER broke. and we were churning 100's of thousands of files over nfs per day.
eventually i had to stop bringing it up in meetings cause it never broke. of course YMMV, mine sure did.
I've been using shfs to connect to my uni ssh server to access my files from home for about 6 months now, no problems at all (with both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels).
Would highly recommend it.