File System in User Space (FUSE)

Some notes ...

Requirements

• Linux (in this case Ubuntu)

Download the required files

The required kernel modules are installed by default if you have a current Ubuntu distribution running. We want to enable access to files via SFTP and FTP, so we need to download two packages:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

and

sudo apt-get install curlftpfs

Now we have everything we need to use fuse on our harddisk.

Setting up the Environment

First of all we have to add our user to the fuse group. My username on the system is klaus, so to add this user we type:

sudo adduser klaus fuse

Of course, your username may differ, so replace 'klaus' with your username ;-)

Next, we want to create a mount point. I decided to keep all my mounts in a directory named 'FUSE', located in my home directory. To do likewise, move to your home directory and create a directory named 'FUSE'.

cd
mkdir FUSE

Okay, now we have our base directory. Next, we want to create a directory to mount a specific remote file system. In this example, the file system of this site. So, a directory named 'maincomputercore' seems to be in order ...

mkdir FUSE/maincomputercore

Well, that's all we have to do. Let's try out FUSE now ...

Using FUSE to mount a FTP account

To mount the remote filesystem using FUSE via FTP, we just type:

curlftpfs -o user=USERNAME:PASSWORD SITE DIRECTORY

Using the example from above, this would be:

curlftpfs -o user=mccuser:topsecret www.maincomputercore.net FUSE/maincomputercore

Please note that the username and password are not the real ones, so you don't need to try these on my site ... ;-)

Now the remote file system should be mounted and can be used if it were on your local hard disk.

To unmount the file system, just type:

fusermount -u MOUNTPOINT

i.e.

fusermount -u FUSE/maincomputercore

Further Reading

I recommend the following resources:

• FUSE at sourceforge

klg