[CS-FSLUG] To SHFS or SSHFS...

[David Aikema]

On 10/20/05, Don Parris <evangelinux at matheteuo.org> wrote:
> > To me it's SSHFS that seems a little more mature than SHFS ... the
> > latter speaks of "perl and shell code for the remote (server) side" so
> > it seems that it's a little more complicated to setup (and if the code
> > is running as root on the opposite end, potentially less secure).
> > Additionally, the website for the latter also notes that "the code was
> > originally developed as an assignment for an Operating Systems course
> > at the Charles University, Prague," and you can take that however you
> > wish.
> >
> That doesn't really mean much to me.  It was a college student in Finland
> who started the development of a hobby OS that we now enjoy!  However, that
> doesn't imply that these people have done a great job of coding.  So that's
> why it doesn't mean much to me.  I would be very afraid if it had been
> written as part of a Microsoft project. ;-)

If I recall correctly, Linus Torvalds was a graduate student at the
time that Linux first started to come together.  It's a little unclear
whether the course for which this program was first produced was a
graduate or undergraduate course, but if the course was undergraduate
then I'd be at least a little more hesitant of its quality (not that
it's necessarily a bad program).

The usage ofshell scripts by SHFS as part of the copy process does
tend to make me a little nervous (although this may be the only way to
allow symlinks to work).  shfs's --cmd option that seems to allow
arbitrary commands to be used is also somewhat disconcerting.

> I am aware of the hazards of running things as root, generally.  I wasn't
> sure how that would apply here.  It makes sense not to, but is there a need
> to do so?

Basically, you'd need the root privileges to be able to set file
ownership correctly (and perhaps a few other things as well that I'm
not thinking of).  If you don't really care about that, then sshfs may
be the way to go.

One other possibility for you may be to continue using NFS, as it's
been fairly highly used for quite some time, and tunnel the traffic
over some sort of VPN connection.

David