Sshfs as regular user through fstab

linux sshfs
Sventimir picture Sventimir · Nov 14, 2013 · Viewed 29.8k times · Source

I'd like to mount a remote directory through sshfs on my Debian machine, say at /work. So I added my user to fuse group and I run:

sshfs [email protected]:/remote/dir /work

and everything works fine. However it would be very nice to have the directory mounted on boot. So I tried the /etc/fstab entry given below:

sshfs#[email protected]:/remote/dir /work     fuse      user,_netdev,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,idmap=user  0   0

sshfs asks for password and mounts almost correctly. Almost because my regular user has no access to the mounted directory and when I run ls -la /, I get:

d?????????   ? ?        ?               ?            ? work

How can I get it with right permissions trough fstab?

Answer

user2845360 picture user2845360 · Nov 14, 2013

Using option allow_other in /etc/fstab allows other users than the one doing the actual mounting to access the mounted filesystem. When you booting your system and mounting your sshfs, it's done by user root instead of your regular user. When you add allow_other other users than root can access to mount point. File permissions under the mount point still stay the same as they used to be, so if you have a directory with 0700 mask there, it's not accessible by anyone else but root and the owner.

So, instead of 

sshfs#[email protected]:/remote/dir /work     fuse      user,_netdev,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,idmap=user  0   0

use

sshfs#[email protected]:/remote/dir /work     fuse      user,_netdev,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,idmap=user,allow_other  0   0

This did the trick for me at least. I did not test this by booting the system, but instead just issued the mount command as root, then tried to access the mounted sshfs as a regular user.

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