Apparently my penchant for over-com­pli­cat­ed solutions (at least, the first time I try) is still somewhat in effect. I was looking for a good solution to mounting my home server file-systems on my laptop whether I am home or on the road. My home solution to this point has been Samba, as the wife is on a Windows machine, but I decided there had to be a better way.

That way first attempted to manifested itself as NFS over SSH... right. After reading about the com­plex­i­ties and possible security problems with that approach, I read another article comparing NFS over SSH to OpenVPN, and started to research OpenVPN as a pos­si­bil­i­ty.

Remember, all I need was a fairly simple and not too slow way to treat files on my home server as if they were local. I was willing to deal w/ lag and other things, so long as I had access. This turned out to be too much of a hassle with NFS-over-SSH or OpenVPN, and I was despairing of finding a simple solution which did not require mucking about as root (I like to keep things in the normal user family), so I was thrilled to find sshfs.

What I like especially about this option is its simplicity. I do not have to muck about on the server, instead I just make sure the ssh server is running (which I always have running anyway), and run the following command on my system.

$ sshfs -C -o reconnect -o sshfs_sync -o follow_symlinks dave@nastie:/srv/family /Users/dave/Network/family

Viola! My home server family storage directory is mounted on my laptop! From outside the router all I have to do is replace "nastie" with my public IP, and I am in business!

Note: This is not automated, but I decided I do not want the mounting to happen au­to­mat­i­cal­ly.

Update: I never mentioned which versions I was using! I installed the latest version of MacFUSE (version 2.0.3), and used the version 2.2.0 sshfs static binaries mentioned on the MacFUSE sshfs wiki page.