How to Mount a Remote Folder using SSH

Connecting to a server across the internet is much more secure using SSH. There is a way that you can mount a folder on a remove server using the SSHFS service.

There are quite a few steps that you’ll have to follow, so get ready and open a terminal window.

Step1:Installing Package

On Ubuntu/Debain

apt-get install sshfs

On Redhat/CentOS/Fedora

Step2:Once the package is installed we have to create a mount point and mount our  server data using sshfs command, for which we require  user-name/password. Here are my details for this task.

My Username: root

My password: redhat

My Server: 10.10.8.192

My mount point: /mnt/ssh

Now create the mount point and mount SSH account data.

#mkdir /mnt/ssh

#sshfs root@10.10.8.192:/ /mnt/ssh/

root@10.10.8.192's password:

Step3:Testing our set-up

Check if you are able to see the SSH data

#cd /mnt/ssh

#ls

Sample output

bin   cdrom     data  etc   initrd.img      lib         media  opt   root  selinux  sys   tmp  var      vmlinuz.old

boot  cmdb-bkp  dev   home  initrd.img.old  lost+found  mnt    proc  sbin  srv      test  usr  vmlinuz

What about df -hs command output?

Sample output

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2              12G  8.4G  2.5G  78% /

/dev/sda6              80G   43G   34G  56% /var

/dev/sda5             2.0G   41M  1.8G   3% /home

/dev/sda1              99M   12M   83M  12% /boot

tmpfs                 506M     0  506M   0% /dev/shm

sshfs#root@10.233.10.212:/

 1000G     0 1000G   0% /mnt/ssh

Step4:So what about mounting it permanently?. We can do it by editing fstab file in /etc folder

#vi /etc/fstab

go to last line and type below line

sshfs#root@10.10.8.192:/ /mnt/ssh fuse defaults 0 0

Save the file and exit. Now run mount -a to update the fstab file state to kernel.

#mount -a

Let me explain what entry in fstab indicates. We are mentioning mount user root data which is located on 10.10.8.192 server on to /mnt/ssh using fuse file system with default settings.

Step5:What about unmounting this drive?

#umount /mnt/ssh