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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. I just recently found it myself by Padrino121 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 .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.

  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. LUFS by telemnar · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  4. 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.

  5. ...or you can try sfs by dwoolridge · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the main page for SFS (Self-certifying File System):
    SFS is a secure, global network file system with completely decentralized control. SFS lets you access your files from anywhere and share them with anyone, anywhere. Anyone can set up an SFS server, and any user can access any server from any client. SFS lets you share files across administrative realms without involving administrators or certification authorities.