Sunday, July 29, 2007

Mount ssh/sftp drives into OSX

Dealing with a server that is hosted requires a stronger level of security. This typically means no ftp or file sharing is allowed. However, ssh is secure and you can even prevent passwords and use rsa keys.
However, all this security does not mean you cannot mount a drive using OSX. Using the MacFuse at google, you can mount a remote ssh/sftp drive with a hostname, username, password (or rsa key) and path.
Steps:
1. Download and install MacFuse from the link
2. Restart your OSX (it does some low level magic that makes writing mounted disks easier)
3. Download and copy the sshfs into your Applications from the link.
Now that you have it download, you can run the sshfs application and connect to your disk.
If you do use an RSA key or the like, you will need to first connect via the command line so that the host gets to be trusted and then it will work fine from there on.

4 comments:

Schleppy said...

Is it possible to connect to SSH servers that don't use the default port 22? That seems to be the only issue I'm having with the program.

Thanks for this writeup, I would have never know about it if Google didn't find your blog :D

Pam Tan said...

Wow, so i had the same issue, googled it, and Ian comes up, now that is strange!

None said...

Happy to help - I tend to use NFS or Drop Box these days but this should still work for you!

bz said...

To help those that come here in the future, macFUSE is no longer maintained. You should use OSXFUSE:
http://osxfuse.github.com/

and macFusion:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24768/macfusion