How To Mount SSHFS On Linux and Windows? – POFTUT

How To Mount SSHFS On Linux and Windows?

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SSH is a secure remote connection protocol used to manage and get a shell from remote systems. SSH is mainly used by Linux distributions. SSH also provides a secure file share over the network which is names as SSHFS.

Install SSHFS Client For Linux

SSHFS is named as file system. We need to install SSHFS file system package for Linux systems.

Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali

$ sudo apt install sshfs
Install SSHFS Client For Linux
Install SSHFS Client For Linux

CentOS, Fedora, RedHat

$ sudo yum install sshfs

Install SSHFS Client For Windows

Windows provides different 3rd party applications those supports SSH and SSHFS. Here a list of them.

  • WinSCP
  • SSHFS
  • Dockany

In this tutorial, we will use the most popular one WinSCP. WinSCP can be downloaded from the following link and installed by Next->Next fashion.

https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/releases/download/v1.0.1/DokanSetup.exe

https://github.com/Foreveryone-cz/win-sshfs/releases/download/1.6.1/WinSSHFS-1.6.1.13-devel.msi

Mount For Linux

Linux can mount SSHFS file systems in different ways. In this part, we will use sshfs command directly. We will provide the remote system IP address or hostname with the path we want to mount. We will also provide the local path we want to mount to. We can also use options about the SSHFS file system.

$ sudo sshfs ismail@192.168.142.144:/home/ismail /mnt

We will use sudo in order to mount to the /mnt. We will also provide remote user which is ismail in this case.

List SSHFS Mounts

We can list all ready mounted SSHFS file systems with the mount command. We will filter with the grep file like below.

$ mount | grep sshfs
List SSHFS Mounts
List SSHFS Mounts

Allow Others To Read and Write For SSHFS

One of the most faced problems is writing to the SSHFS mounted directories. Because during mount we use sudo which will mount with the root privileges. This will cause other users cannot read or write to the mounted directories. We can use -o option with the allow_other to enable to read and write to the SSHFS mounted directories.

$ sudo sshfs -o allow_other ismail@192.168.142.144:/home/ismail /mnt

Provide SSH Private Key For Authentication

SSHFS service is provided over SSH port and uses SSH for authentication. SSH can authenticate users in different ways like password, private key etc. We can use a certificate in order to authenticate the user. In this example we will use IdentityFile option with the certificate path.

$ sudo sshfs -o allow_other,IdentityFile=~/.ssh/id_rsa ismail@192.168.142.144:/home/ismail /mnt

Mount For Windows

We will just provide the IP address or Host name, username and password for the SSHFS mmount. We can also change the drive letter where the remote system will be mount.

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Mount For Windows
Mount For Windows

UnMount For Linux

We can unmount the SSHFS file system for Linux distributions. We just need to provide the path we have already mounted. In this example, we will unmount from /mnt with the umount command. Keep in mind that the mounted path shouldn’t be in use.

$ sudo umount /mnt

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