I have been fooling around with CFEclipse for a while, and one of the things it still lacks is full FTP support. For some reason my VSFTP at home on my Ubuntu box was throwing a out of index error on Eclipse. So I decided to mount my filesystem via ssh, for more security, on my Ubuntu distro on a laptop.

The following is a guide of how to mount an SSH filesystem using sshfs on Ubuntu (Breezy 5.10).

Please note that SSH is a more secure protocol than ftp or Samba.

The first thing you need to do is install sshfs via the apt-get utility. Below is a description of sshfs:

sshfs is a filesystem client based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol.

Since most SSH servers already support this protocol it is very easy to

set up: i.e. on the server side there?s nothing to do. On the client

side mounting the filesystem is as easy as logging into the server with

ssh.

Install sshfs by doing a:

$sudo apt-get install sshfs

This will install fuse-utils and libfuse2 which are required. After the install is successfull then you will need to change the permissions on the following file in order to run an sshfs command.

$sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount

This will allow your user to run the fusermount command, which is used by sshfs to mount ssh filesystems.

After this you are ready to use the command. However, you will need to create the mount point of where you want the ssh directory to be mounted. Let's say that you want to connect to the following directory in your server via ssh: "/MyDocuments" and you want to mount this directory in the following local directory: "/home/luis/Mounts/MyDocuments"

If this is the case then I would run the following command to mount the ssh filesystem:

$sshfs [email protected]:/MyDocuments /home/luis/Mounts/MyDocuments/

After you run this command you will be prompted for your account password. Once you successfully enter your password, your filesystem will be mounted.

Please remember that if you want to mount an ssh filesystem, you need to have an active SSH account on the system you are trying to connect to.

Now if you need to unmount the filesystem, then run the following command:

$sudo umount /home/luis/Mounts/MyDocuments/

And you will unmount the ssh filesystem.

You can find much more information about ssh and ubuntu in the following location:

http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

And there you go.