SSHFS in Windows via Samba and Virtualbox

Seth — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:14:45 +0000

My fileserver has an SSH server, so I’ve always been able to remotely connect to it via WinSCP. Recently this has gotten a bit tedious because I would have to wait for a file to finish downloading on my client before I could use it. Recently I finally went through the trouble of figuring out a better way. Since I’ve been using Virtualbox with an Ubuntu virtual machine I figured that I could mount my remote directory via SSHFS in the virtual machine and then share it out via a samba server to my “host” machine running windows. This would allow me to securely (and relatively easily) get native(ish) mounting in windows. I’m going to assume that you’ve worked with some of that stuff before, so I’ll skip the step-by-step.

Here’s the answer to the tricky part:

Fuse is a little special (I’m sure for good reason) in that it doesn’t like other people running it. Whenever I would mount the remote directory via SSHFS it would work fine for the virtual machine, but I could never successfully share it out via Samba. It turns out that Fuse wasn’t letting Samba gain access because Samba runs as a different user than the user that mounted the file system.

The fix:

Edit /etc/fuse.conf so that the line “user_allow_other” is uncommented (or, if the file isn’t there, touch it and then add the line).

Then mount the SSHFS to the directory that you are sharing via Samba. The key part is that you must use the “allow_other” option.

For example: $ sshfs example.com:/media/alpha /media/remotessh/ -o allow_other

That fixed it for me. If that still doesn’t work, double check your samba config file to make sure the permissions, passwords, etc are all configured properly and that your user account is added to the “fuse” group. For reference: My server is running Ubuntu 10.10 and my client VM is running Ubuntu 11.04. Good luck!

http://www.wynia.org/ was a great help for me figuring this out.

Bandwidth Monitoring in Linux

Seth — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:24:31 +0000

I travel to frequently and as such need to be able to keep an eye on my servers. I use SSH extensively for this purpose. I’ve been looking for some tools to keep track of bandwidth usage using the command line for a while and recently found some that do exactly what I want.

I found a list that introduced me to a bunch of different tools. Two of my favorites are bmon and bwm-ng. Both of these command line tools can be installed in Ubuntu by using apt-get. technical

SudoSeth » Technical Notes

SSHFS in Windows via Samba and Virtualbox

Bandwidth Monitoring in Linux