Automounting a remote server over SSH with sshfs and autofs

Ben Tasker

2021-11-19 19:46

Sometimes it can be pretty useful to access a remote system's filesystem from your own, and sometimes NFS isn't a great fit for the connectivity at hand.

It is, however, possible to use sshfs to mount a remote filesystem on pretty much any box that you can SSH to - giving quite a bit of convenience without the need to make changes at the remote end.

This documentation details how to create an auto-mounting SSHFS mount

The first thing we need to know, is the path (on the remote end) that we intend to mount. Finding that may be as simple as SSHing over and running

pwd

On your client system, you need to install both sshfs and autofs

sudo apt-get install autofs sshfs

Then create a directory for your mounts to live in

mkdir ~/mounts

We'll want the mounts to use our UID and GID, so check what they are

UID=`id -u`
GID=`id -g`

Then, we want to append a line to the autofs config

echo "/home/$USER/mounts /etc/autofs.sshfs uid=$UID,gid=$GID,--timeout=60,--ghost" | sudo tee -a /etc/auto.master

(--timeout specifies how long a mount can be idle before it's unmounted, adjust as needed. --ghost simple tells autofs to create the mount directories even if the filesystem isn't currently mounted)

Next, we need to create the mapping file

echo "mac -fstype=fuse,rw,allow_other :sshfs\#btasker@mac.home\:/Users/btasker" | sudo tee /etc/autofs.sshfs

This tells autofs:

Create a subdir called mac
When that subdir is accessed, ssh as btasker to mac.home and mount /Users/btasker into mac
allow_other tells autofs should allow other users to access the Mac - we use this because the service runs the mount as root
(Yes, I may have done all this to help avoid having to use the Mac keyboard)

Note that # and : are special characters in sshfs configuration, and so need to be escaped.

We're not quite there yet, though. The actual mounting operation gets run as root, and so it's root that needs to be able to SSH onto the target host.

sudo -i
ssh-keygen -b 4096
ssh-copy-id [user]@[targetbox] # e.g. btasker@mac.home
ssh [user]@[targetbox] # Verify that you get logged in

Finally, restart Autofs

systemctl restart autofs

And then verify that the mount works

ls ~/mounts/mac

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