I’m not exactly a road warrior, but most of what I do is in the field. I’ve written in various forums that there are a few applications and utilities essential to me and “how I roll.” One of them is GNU screen. Another is SSH. These two allow me to work from the same session anywhere without ever stopping.
I’m also a huge fan of sshfs. This is a FUSE filesystem that allows a user to mount a remote home partition via SSH as though it were local.
Here’s a little tip if you’re working on a laptop in a situation where you have limited space on its hard drive, or if you’re in an area where there’s significant risk of losing your data through computer theft or some kind of disaster. It’s also cheaper than buying a new laptop hard drive.
Let me give an example. Let’s say you’re on your laptop at the university. There’s significant risk of theft of laptops and everything else. You need to work on your project but you want to insure you don’t lose all your effort in case your laptop “disappears,” if it gets dropped, whatever. You can lose an entire semester’s (or longer) work if something bad like that happens.
WIth sshfs, you can keep your work on your desktop (or server) computer at home. It doesn’t end up on your laptop’s hard drive, but you still have the easy and fast access as though it were because it uses the Unix idea of “everything as a file” in joining remote to local.
You would only need to run ssh on the computer at home so that you can access it remotely (and as securely or insecurely as you desire). On the laptop, you would run the fuse module and then enter the command:
% sshfs username@path.to.desktop.or.server: laptop.mountpoint/
So if your account name at home is “lucky” and you want to set a mount point (directory) on the laptop for “remote” it would look something like this:
% sshfs lucky@my.home.network: remote/
You’re asked to enter the password for user lucky and then that mounts the entire /home/lucky directory on the other computer to ~/remote on the laptop. Once you do that, you can transfer files back and forth as though it were all local — the same as any other files or filesystems mounted on your computer.
If you have a similar/compatible set of applications on both computers, you can also just get with it and use your remotely stored data files with your local applications. If you’re using Open Office’s calc or Gnumeric for your spreadsheets, you would just open whichever files from the remote computer on the local one. Then when you save, you’re saving remotely.
This minimizes the need to sync files between laptop, desktop, and/or server or keep up with multiple versions of the same data because you can use the same version universally. You can get by with less space on your remote/laptop hard drive if you have large files to work on. Just use your larger (cheaper) hard drive on your desktop/server for all your storage.
When you’re finished and want to unmount the remote system and terminate SSH, you enter:
% fusermount -u ~/remote/
Since it uses SSH, it’s more secure than a lot of other options including keeping data on tiny USB devices that can disappear even easier than laptops. And while there can be risk of theft of your desktop computer while you’re away, that risk is much lower if you use a bulky old (cheap) computer for such purposes. The more stuff you put in it to weigh it down (six combined floppy and optical drive slots don’t have to be filled with working — or even connected — drives), the less likely a thief will be interested in carrying it. Instead of adding another working computer (or broken floppy and Zip drives) to your local landfill, why not put it to good use?
It doesn’t need to be bleeding edge, you just need to be able to shell into it to access your safe data and have enough storage to make it worthwhile. It also doesn’t have to be big and heavy as described above — you could carry a “craptop” on campus and leave your good laptop in the safety of your home. Whatever you use can serve other duties as well if you put your mind to it.
And you can get by without ever touching your laptop hard drive (or needing one). Some Linux live CDs, including Damn Small Linux, come with FUSE and sshfs. Since DSL contains extensions like Open Office, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc., it would be quite easy to work remotely like this.
Both FUSE and sshfs are available with nearly all Linux distributions or should easily be added if not, as well as for FreeBSD and NetBSD (possibly other smaller ones, but not to my knowledge in OpenBSD). More FUSE fun soon.
