Re: sshfs

Junichi is delighted with sshfs. So am I - I now keep mounted some directories from several of my servers from my workstation, and it becomes oh-so-much-easier to do basically everything. Besides, sshfs seems to have been planned right security-wise - It is based on FUSE, so any user can just do $ mkdir remote_home $ sshfs user@server.org:/home/user remote_home and start working - What I found as a very sensible default is that the mounted pseudofilesystem is not visible by any other local user - Not even to almighty root. Of course, this is overridable. Now, Junichi just misses some performance when -of course- working with large files. I have noticed that, of course (after all, my home DSL connection is 512/128, so… opening by mistake a mere 1MB file makes me quite unhappy). My gripe is that it is slow dealing with directories with too many files, even though directories are (supposed to be?) cached. After thinking on this for a while (and not having straced mutt to assure me I’m right, I think it’s because I tried to run a local mutt with remote maildirs - of course, scanning a couple thousand messages for their headers will not be a fast operation. Well, some day or other I’ll finish setting up my mailbox at home to be IMAPable. And not even then, I fear, it will be very fast. I think it’s time to dust off EOT, which seemed like a good idea, was a neat and easy implementation… But I never really used it.

Comments

Marius Gedminas 2006-08-07 10:04:47

offlineimap

I use offlineimap (and dovecot’s imapd over an ssh link) to synchronize a bunch of maildirs on my laptop and on my server. It’s pretty nice – offlineimap synchronizes changes in both directions, and so far it hasn’t lost any of my mail.

Mutt is sort-of-slowish on my maildirs when they have more than a few hundred messages. I haven’t tried it over sshfs, but I don’t think I’d have the patience.