{"id":59,"date":"2007-01-17T22:33:29","date_gmt":"2007-01-18T04:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geekmuse.dreamhosters.com\/wp\/?p=59"},"modified":"2007-01-18T12:47:17","modified_gmt":"2007-01-18T18:47:17","slug":"trying-out-fuse-on-the-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geekmuse.dreamhosters.com\/wp\/?p=59","title":{"rendered":"Trying out FUSE (on the Mac)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following our latest podcast where we mentioned Google’s Mac Blog<\/a>, I figured I’d give FUSE (Filesystem in User Space)<\/A> a shot. I downloaded the Mac installable page from here<\/a>. A couple clicks and a reboot and I’m all set to go.<\/p>\n

The Mac package from Google just contains sshfs<\/a>, but it also contains all the FUSE libraries, so the other interfaces should compile fairly painlessly (I would hope). To mount a filesystem, a user just calls ‘sshfs’ with some mount-like arguments:<\/p>\n

mkdir \/path\/to\/mountpoint
\nsshfs username@somehost:\/path\/to\/dir \/path\/to\/mountpoint<\/span><\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/p>\n

To unmount, you use the OS provided ‘umount’:<\/p>\n

umount \/path\/to\/mountpoint<\/span><\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/p>\n

If you’re going for your home directory and have the same username, you can use the usual ‘ssh’ shortcut:<\/p>\n

sshfs somehost: \/path\/to\/mountpoint<\/span><\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/p>\n

If you run an ssh-agent and have your authorized_keys file set up on the remote host, it shouldn’t ask you for a password or anything. If not, you’ll get the usual SSH passphrase prompt.<\/p>\n

There are a ton<\/B> of options to sshfs. Half are ssh related, the other half are FUSE related. The only one that’s of practical interest is the ‘-C’ option, to turn on compression. If you like long arguments, you can use “-o compression=true”. This’ll be really helpful if you’re working with text files, but it’ll slow things down if you’re working with images\/movies\/MP3\/etc.<\/p>\n

The integration with OS X leaves a bit to be desired. The mount shows up in ‘df’, but the filesystem stats are set to a terabyte, with zero bytes used. The mount doesn’t place nice with the Desktop like other typical mounts, and there’s no integration (yet, I’m hoping) with the Finder “Connect to Server” (Cmd-K) interface. How doesn’t the mount play nice with the Desktop? Well, the mount didn’t show up on the Desktop, but it does if you open it via Finder (enter the command: “open \/tmp\/testsshfs” in a terminal window). Then it doesn’t go away, even when you unmount it. Later, it did go away when I mounted something new. Weird. Anyways, I wasn’t expecting it to work nice with the Desktop, although you can interact with a mounted volume via the Finder interface, just like any other directory.<\/p>\n

I’m still experimenting, but I’ve been brainstorming a few uses: