from Hacker News

A currently maintained fork of SSHFS

by feldrim on 9/5/23, 11:04 AM with 139 comments

  • by zitterbewegung on 9/5/23, 1:10 PM

    If you want something in user land and you don't mind emacs there is TRAMP “Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol”. https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

    I use it a lot when I am accessing files from my server on my MacBook Pro .

  • by jmclnx on 9/5/23, 1:10 PM

    Interesting, I alaways assumed sshfs was part of OpenSSH, learn something new every day.

    Also, looks like sshfs used in Slackware is abandoned.

    https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

    A quote from the link, I wonder if this project will be the 'one':

    >If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork.

    I also wonder if it was abandoned due to the RHEL re-orgs like what happened to bluetooth.

  • by rsync on 9/5/23, 2:28 PM

    A note …

    I have transitioned from years of macfuse + sshfs on Mac to just installing the excellent “mountain duck” tool which gives you finder and mount point access to an sftp endpoint.

    Very nice software and indispensable for me.

  • by dontcontactme on 9/5/23, 2:49 PM

    sshfs is no longer maintained? That's sad, I used sshfs in school to be able to use my zillion vim plugins to edit code without having to install them all on the remote server we used for compute. I was surprised with how smooth of a system it was.

  • by qbane on 9/5/23, 2:41 PM

    I think SFTP is a good but underrated protocol, when mirroring a file tree bidirectionally makes more sense than cloning one to another. Having forked and studied from SSHFS' code, I am currently maintaining a list of resources and some personal thoughts on https://hackmd.io/@q/sftp-over-ws.

  • by vmlinuz on 9/5/23, 1:39 PM

    It's obviously a slightly different combination of technologies, but I've been using NFS over wireguard pretty happily for a while...

  • by kiririn on 9/5/23, 12:08 PM

    rclone mount is my go-to now for sshfs functionality - better performance, stability and caching options

  • by chrkl on 9/5/23, 11:52 AM

    Unfortunately, this fork does not look very vivid. Last commit in March, almost not activity in terms of PRs and issues. I would not bet on it.

  • by madacol on 9/5/23, 12:56 PM

    Nautilus (Ubuntu's file explorer) allows to mount SFTP folders. Supposedly it uses `gvfs` under the hood.

    Note that SFTP uses an SSH connection for its file transfers, so I have not seen an UI difference from SSHFS

  • by the-alchemist on 9/5/23, 1:21 PM

    Anyone try rclone or sshfs on Mac OS X with macfuse/osxfuse?

  • by thecosmicfrog on 9/5/23, 12:00 PM

    The main file is a C file which is nearly 5,000 lines long. Impressive.

    https://github.com/deadbeefsociety/sshfs/blob/main/sshfs.c

  • by saurik on 9/5/23, 11:27 AM

    > The current maintainer continues to apply pull requests and makes regular releases, but unfortunately has no capacity to do any development beyond addressing high-impact issues.

    Assuming this is true--and I think it is fair to trust the author of the statement when judging the same author--this doesn't sound like a project that needs a fork, as it apparently in fact does have an active maintainer; if you want to help contribute to sshfs, you thereby can do that without forking it and causing a mess for everyone having to decide which one to use/ship and without the bad blood inherent in resorting to the four-letter F-word of open source project management.

  • by effie on 9/8/23, 1:06 AM

    Is there a more security-oriented alternative to SSHFS, where the connecting client won't be given shell access on the server? I just want to share a directory from server to an untrusted VM over network, and have VM mount it, not give the VM shell access to the server.

    FTP is close to such a thing, but it is somewhat archaic, slow and not sure about its security.

  • by hot_gril on 9/5/23, 4:07 PM

    I remember using SSHFS way back in the day on Mac, also back then thinking "SSHFS" meant "SSH + HFS." It was always confusing to grab the right tools for it, and it never worked very well. With remote codebases, I just SSH in and edit in Vim.

  • by moontear on 9/5/23, 1:07 PM

    How are the different packages for the different *nix distros maintained? I see the link to repology, but that service only tracks the packages - who created the packages and where are they generated in the repo?

  • by computersuck on 9/6/23, 2:04 AM

    Is it google summer of code or some similar event right now?

    Looks like the most recent issues and PRs are just junk typo / grammar fixes

  • by blueflow on 9/5/23, 11:28 AM

    Good, it seems people can't stand it if software just exists and does its job and doesn't get new commits each month.

  • by feldrim on 9/5/23, 6:39 PM

    > This repository has been archived by the owner on May 26, 2022. It is now read-only.

    > This project is no longer maintained or developed. Github issue tracking and pull requests have therefore been disabled. The mailing list (see below) is still available for use.

    If you would like to take over this project, you are welcome to do so. Please fork it and develop the fork for a while. Once there has been 6 months of reasonable activity, please contact Nikolaus@rath.org and I'll be happy to give you ownership of this repository or replace with a pointer to the fork.

    I saw that there are some semi-active forks focusing on different aspects: a rust rewrite, a persistent cache support version, or a bug fixing only version.

    The issue is that most software has bugs and vulnerabilities which has not been discovered yet while the software is not maintained. It means the problems will exist without a solution for the future. Open source software maintainers have been a significant part of our overall IT environment [0] but voluntary contributions are subject to human resource limits. SSHFS is one of those projects relying on a single maintainer which has ended up being archived. The packages on many distributions repositories are stuck as is. The several semi-active forks are also owned by a single person without a proper community. I'm not sure if any of the distro communities would pick one of those and package it to be the next version.

    So, the users of these software on their own, with the single, cross platform, ultimately portable packaging solution: the source code.

    0. https://xkcd.com/2347/

  • by williamstein on 9/5/23, 1:26 PM

    Related -- last month I wrote an implementation of something very similar to sshfs, but in Typescript over a WebSocket: https://github.com/sagemathinc/websocketfs

  • by Timshel on 9/5/23, 11:59 AM

    Discovered that you can replace sshfs with rclone. And the project appear to be way more active : https://github.com/rclone/rclone

    Edit: cf: https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/