Arch Linux

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

autosshfs provides an easy way to create and use autofs-sshfs-mountpoints as a regular user. Essentially, it allows you to just type:

ls /home/me/mnt/ssh/myremotehost

… and the system will parse "myremotehost" and set up the connection and the mountpoint.*

It was created (or rather: put together from existing scripts, as the author phrased it) by Hellekin, but needed a few adjustements to work in Arch Linux, most notably the init system(s), so I forked it. The original plan was for Hellekin to pull the changes back into his repository, but as I haven't been able to contact him/her for quite some time now, I just went ahead and made a PKGBUILD using my forked repo. Update: Arch Linux (among others) is now supported .

For further information, I recommend the Readme on the original repo site.

Here is the AUR package (which points to my forked repo).

* Note that last time I tried, the parser was not fully functional, i. e. I couldn't just

ls /home/me/mnt/ssh//[user@]myremotehost[:port]

but had to set up a abbrevation in ~ /.ssh/config like

Host myhost
    HostName my.host's.long.name
    Port 123456
    User myusername
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa

so that the username and the port could be omitted on the command line. This is no big hassle for me, though.

Last edited by Franek (2013-07-03 11:23:27)

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

Re: autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

In case anyone tried it and it didn't work: At least on my system, autosshfs seems to be affected by Bug 35409. The fix in the first comment on the bug tracker worked for me.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

I haven't tried this, but I was thinking when I saw the title "What does this offer that I can't get from just sshfs and systemd.automount?"  Then I saw the regular user part.  Indeed I cannot create an automount service as a normal user.

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

Re: autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

Ah, I hadn't even realized systemd could do that. But as you wrote, this method requires write accress to /etc/fstab, i.e. root access. Moreover, with autosshfs one can create ssh mounts on the fly, without having to edit any config file. I don't know if this can be done with systemd automounts.

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

Re: autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

So, I tried to perform all necessary steps (on source, PKGBUILD, install file and autofs service file) for the /usr/bin-move, and guess what, it does not seem to work anymore. Right now I do not have time to look deeper into this, but if anyone else wants to have a look: due to my great idea to use no testing environment whatsoever, all changes are already uploaded to the repo and the AUR.

Seriously, though, I am going to look into this.

Last edited by Franek (2013-06-06 22:03:48)

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

Re: autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

It is working again! There were some wrong bin paths left in the install file, which I had completely overlooked last week. Sorry about that.

Also, I noticed some acitivity in Hellekin's original repository and sent him a pull request (after creating a new fork and not messing up the commit messages this time). Hopefully the adjustments for Arch can be merged.

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

Re: autosshfs packaged for Arch: non-root sshfs-automounting with autofs

There is a new release of autosshfs, numbered 0.3.0 and named "Flying Edward (to safety)".

Support for Arch Linux and other distributions is now built in, so I changed the AUR package to point to hellekins repo and, while I was at it, fixed a bug in the .install file. Enjoy.