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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 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.
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*!
sounds a lot like LUFS ( http://lufs.sf.net ) which lets you mount remote filesystems via SSH, FTP, and several other novel protocols.
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.