I often have to upload files to several servers, and some of them doesn’t have an rsync or ftp server, so if I’m going to make a deployment, I have to use scp, or sftp to upload the files.

This works well when I need to make a quick change or test 1 file, but If I have to synchronize several files it is a very time consuming task.

So what I use in this cases is sshfs it is a pretty cool tool, to allow me to mount any filesystem so I can use any rsync on a remote server without dealing with opening ports configure, the server or do other stuff,

Gentoo is my main OS, so it was really easy to have this working, I had to reconfigure the kernel to support fuse

  1. Symbol: FUSE_FS [=m]
  2. Location:
  3.   -> File systems
  4.       -> Filesystem in Userspace support

and after this was ready I only installed sys-fs/sshfs-fuse

  1. [I] sys-fs/sshfs-fuse
  2.      Available versions:  1.9 ~2.1 2.2
  3.      Installed versions:  2.2(12:33:09 PM 09/08/2009)
  4.      Homepage:            http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html
  5.      Description:         Fuse-filesystem utilizing the sftp service.

when it was ready I did the following to mount the remote filesystem:

  1. ivan@gondor ~ $ sshfs ivan@prestant.citizenhawk.net: prestant/

After this I’m able to use the remote file system as usual.