310. Remote mounting using sshfs

I've run out of USB ports on my work desktop, so I occasionally cheat and attach USB drives to one of my compute nodes and transfer the files across the network to my desktop. Since I've got a gigabit switch set up, the speeds are quite acceptable.

NFS isn't really a solution here. Instead, sshfs is the tool to use.

The local and remote computer will be referring to Desktop and Node, respectively. The specific example I'm using here is that of a USB drive manually mounted on the Node, which contains pictures that I want to transfer to my Desktop.

On the Node
The plugged in USB device is found as /dev/sdb, and holds only one partition, /dev/sdb1.

sudo mkdir /media/usbdrive
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usbdrive

On the Desktop

sudo apt-get install sshfs
sudo mkdir /media/remote
sudo sshfs $USER@Node:/media/usbdrive /media/remote -o allow_other

That's about it. To unmount do

sudo umount /media/remote

and

sudo umount /media/usbdrive

respectively.