One of the things I’m trying to do is mount remote filesystems on my Mac using MacFUSE and sshfs. In short, the idea is you use ssh/sftp to connect to a remote system and “mount” its filesystem (using the SSH connection) so that it appears as a mounted volume on your local machine. In general, this works great; you only need SSH access to the remote host–not SMB, CIFS, or any other standard, but perhaps firewalled, network file sharing protocol.

But, what if the remote filesystem you want to mount is actually a mounted SMB share? You would think it should “just work,” right? It kind of does, sorta. But, only sorta.

I start out by using sshfs to mount the remote filesystem:

dossy@shiny:~$ sshfs foobar:/share x -o volname=x

Nothing surprising: this just works as you’d expect. I’m mounting the subdirectory /share on foobar to my local mountpoint named “x” as a Mac volume named “x”. Lets make sure we can write to it:

dossy@shiny:~$ cd x
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel  4096 Sep 13 20:40 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 root  wheel     0 Sep 13 18:23 ..
dossy@shiny:~/x$ echo "This is a test." > test.txt
dossy@shiny:~/x$ cat test.txt
This is a test.

There, we can write to this remote filesystem just fine–this is great! But, this was all from the shell, what about from the Finder? Ahh, this is where things start to suck hard. I create a small test file called “suckage.txt” and try to copy it to the sshfs mount:

Attempting this copy operation results in this error dialog:

Say what? I don’t have sufficient privileges? Finder, you’re crazy. Watch this:

dossy@shiny:~/x$ cp ~/Desktop/suckage.txt .
dossy@shiny:~/x$ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxrwx   1 root   wheel     0 Sep 13 21:49 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 35 dossy  staff  1190 Sep 13 20:57 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    20 Sep 13 21:51 suckage.txt
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root   wheel    16 Sep 13 20:45 test.txt

Looks like I had privileges just fine–why couldn’t Finder copy the file? I suspect it has a lot to do with the crazy AppleDouble nonsense that Finder messes with, none of which happens when I just copy the files in a shell.

I’ve spent at least an hour playing Configuration Option Bingo (you know, when you try turning on and off all the various configuration options until you get the permutation that solves your problem, at which point you want to jump up and shout out “BINGO!”) … with no luck. I’ve tried “-o noappledouble” and the other obvious things. I’m now giving up and blogging this, hoping that someone out there has figured this out and might share their secret; I sure couldn’t turn up anything useful by Googling, that’s for sure.

Tags: Apple, MacOS X, MacFUSE, sshfs, Samba, smb, fail

So, I finally broke down and ordered myself a 15″ MacBook Pro from MacMall.com on Tuesday last week, and it arrived the next day (!) … and I’ve been installing apps and migrating my data over to it since. I guess you can officially call me “a switcher” as I’ve moved all my data off my old laptop onto this new one, and the old one is going to get reformatted and will become my wife’s.

Part of switching to a Mac means looking for new blogging software. I previously used BlogJet 2.0 on Win32, but now I’m trying out ecto 3 beta for MacOS X. I definitely think it’s going to take some getting used to but I can already tell it’s much better than BlogJet was. However, I can definitely see needing to customize ecto to my liking before I can feel really comfortable using it.

Have you switched recently? Got any good tips that I might want to know about? Things to avoid? Tell me about it in the comments …