Friday, November 20, 2009

Mount filesystems over ssh, ftp, etc on OSX with MacFUSE, Macfusion, and a fix for snow leopard

OS X can already mount folders shared by windows machines with smbfs (Finder - Connect to server), or WebDAV natively. With a little more software, you can mount any (*nix) filesystem over ssh or ftp, with macFuse/Fusion.

'FUSE' is something like Filesystem in User SpacE.. that means it doesn't have to be part of the OS directly, most importantly making easy for developers to try something, test it, fix it, and try again really quick, instead of maybe having to compile a whole OS, rebooting, etc. This has been around for a long time on Linux, and a while for Macs too. Just a whole lot easier on a Mac because there's some nice interfaces.

  1. MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X’s native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. Visit the MacFUSE website for more information.
  2. install, you will need to reboot.
  3. Get Macfusion from http://www.macfusionapp.org/ and install it.
  4. Run it and mount some drives. After it's mounted, you can exit Macfusion.
One problem, it didn't work for me.. because I have the newer 10.6 (snow leopard). The error I got (see the macfusion log viewer) was:

(macfusionAgent, SSHServerFS, norad, 11/20/09 7:35 PM) dyld: could not load inserted library: /Applications/Utilities/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/sshnodelay.so

I put mine in Utilities, but you might also see the path
/Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/sshnodelay.so

tell it to look for beta versions, check for update, remove an old module, and then it works..


I see my password in the macfusion log viewer -- how to I get rid of that?

No comments: