SSHFS is a filesystem client to mount and interact with directories and files located on a remote server or workstation over a normal ssh connection.

Install SSHFS


To mount directory in remote server, you will need to install SSHFS

sudo yum -y install sshfs


Once installed, you can simply try to mount your remote server. Note that the remote server must support SSH.

sshfs ck@192.168.10.7:/data/disk1 /mnt/disk1


Auto-mount remote directory while server boot

If you want to setup auto-mounting remote directory, you need to create your own signature like below

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "ck@ckii.com"

While you create your own key, you will need to put your location where to save your key. By default, it will be saved to /YOUR_HOME_DIR/.ssh/id_rsa

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/ck/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/ck/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/ck/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:EociK2DFhCX85+RuLAoj2pGdr/QXqbNzSiAzUwxOdV4 ck@ckii.com
The key's randomart image is:
+---[RSA 4096]----+
| .+*= o E        |
| oo=.o + .       |
|  +.o + . .      |
| . o. o+ .       |
|  = o=. S.       |
|   B +o o        |
|  o +..o .       |
|...o +B +        |
|o.ooo+=O         |
+----[SHA256]-----+

You may want pem file in some cases, and below commands can do that:

ssh-keygen -f id_rsa -m 'PEM' -e > id_rsa.pem


Follow-up action you need to do is copying ID by ssh-copy-id <id@remote_server>

ssh-copy-id ck@192.168.10.7

If everything went well, you will be able to connect to your server without typing pass-phrase like before.


In order to auto-mount remote directory, you will need to add following lines at /etc/fstab

user_id@server_address:<where_to_mount> <target_directory> fuse.sshfs defaults,idmap=user,allow_other,delay_connect,reconnect,_netdev,users,IdentityFile=<your_key_location> 0 0

Below is an working example

kurapa@192.168.10.7:/data/disk1 /mnt/disk1 fuse.sshfs defaults,idmap=user,allow_other,delay_connect,reconnect,_netdev,users,IdentityFile=/home/ck/.ssh/id_rsa 0 0

Note that I had a problem that the CentOS server can't auto-mount by sshfs in some cases, delay_connect solved my paint points, and it doesn't make any performance issues but stable auto-mounting in the latest multi-core servers.


In AWS EC2, you will need to use keypair to access your server, and following is an example to auto-mount your AWS EC2 instances:

sshfs#centos@10.0.1.6:/pub/ /mnt/live1 fuse    user,_netdev,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,idmap=user,allow_other,IdentityFile=your-keypair_root.pem  0   0
sshfs#centos@10.0.1.7:/pub/ /mnt/live2 fuse    user,_netdev,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,idmap=user,allow_other,IdentityFile=your-keypair_root.pem  0   0

Note that your-keypair_root.pem should be owned by root with 400 in permission, sshfs# need to be added to the account information, and fuse.sshfs needs to be changed to fuse.

Enhance access speed with no encryption

If you want to enhance its access speed even though its security is poor than before, you can stop encryption by adding Ciphers=aes128-ctr,Compression=no like below:

For on-prem servers:

kurapa@192.168.10.91:/ /data/synology fuse.sshfs   defaults,idmap=user,Ciphers=aes128-ctr,Compression=no,allow_other,delay_connect,reconnect,_netdev,users,umask=0002,IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/id_rsa 0 0

For AWS servers

sshfs#centos@10.0.1.6:/pub/ /mnt/live1 fuse    user,_netdev,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,idmap=user,Ciphers=aes128-ctr,Compression=no,allow_other,IdentityFile=your-keypair_root.pem  0   0


If you want to have more performance, please try NFS.