Macfuse sshfs over autofs on OS X
If you are regularly mounting a sshfs volume on your Mac, you can automate this by using autofs. The goal is to mount the filesystem transparently.
Update: This how-to does not work. But you could use these notes as a starting point to resolve the remaining issues. The automounting feature is not correctly implemented in the current Macfuse&sshfs stack.
Luckily, it is possible to get a similar behavior by mounting sshfs with the option “reconnect”.
This howto has been tested with Mac OS X 10.5.5, Macfuse 1.7, sshfs 1.0.0.
Assuming you have installed the latest Macfuse and sshfs, there should reside the sshfs.app in /Applications.
Install mount_sshfs:
sudo ln /Applications/sshfs.app/Contents/Resources/sshfs-static-10.5 /sbin/mount_sshfs sudo ln /Applications/sshfs.app/Contents/Resources/sshnodelay.so /usr/local/lib/
Create /etc/fstab if not already existing. Append this line, replacing “user”, “server”, “volname”:
user@server: /Network/volname sshfs compression=yes,reconnect,volname=volname,uid=501,gid=0,allow_other,nobrowse 0 0
Login as root, generate keys (accepting the standard options), and add the keys to enable a passwordless remote login. Replace “user”, “server”.
sudo -s -u root ssh-keygen cat /var/root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@server 'mkdir .ssh && cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'
Now you can reload the autofs configuration, and you should then see your mounted filesystem in Finder’s Network or on /Network/volname.
sudo automount -cv
Good luck, and have fun!