5.7 Remote disk mounts

With remote disk mounts you can use your CSC directories in a way that resembles the usage of an external disk or USB memory stick. Using this approach normally requires installing some extra software to your local computer, but it also makes the usage very fluent as no scp or other data transfer programs are needed to move files between local computer and CSC.

On Mac OSX and linux machines, sshfs can be used to mount some disk areas at CSC to users own machine. With this tool the remote disk areas at the servers of CSC can be used just like local directories. To be able to use sshfs you local Linux machine must have FUSE ( http://fuse.sourceforge.net/) and sshfs ( https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs) installed. In the case of MacOSX the required packages are OSXFUSE and SSHFS (https://osxfuse.github.io)

For Windows machines similar functionality is provided with the Dokan software (https://dokan-dev.github.io/).

Using sshfs in Linux

Once sshfs is installed in your Linux machine you can create remote disk mount with command syntax:

sshfs username@hostname: mountpoint

For example, to make you home directory of user kkayttaj visible to a local Linux computer, execute command:

mkdir csc_home
sshfs kkayttaj@taito.csc.fi: ./csc_home

The first command creates an empty directory that will be used as the mount point in the second command. When the remote mount is established, you can use the directory as any directory in your Linux system. For example, to see the content of the CSC home directory of kkayttaj, you could now give a command:

ls csc_home

By default, the remote directory to be mounted is the users home directory. You can mount other directories too by adding the directory path after the : character. Following commands would mount the $WRKDIR directory user kkayttaj in Taito to a directory taito_wrk on the local machine:

mkdir taito_wrk
sshfs kkayttaj@taito.csc.fi:/wrk/kkayttaj ./taito_wrk

Note that the remote directory to be mounted, must be owned by the user. Further, the response times of the remote directories are of cause often much longer than in the case of real local directories.

To unmount; the file system, give a command:

fusermount -u mountpoint

For example the remote mounts, created in the examples above, would be removed with commands:

fusermount -u csc_home
fusermount -u taito_wrk