tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

1. 

   Martin Alderson
   June 2nd, 2005 - 18:22

   I agree entirely. It’s exceedingly frustrating.

   This sort of thing needs to Just Work(tm).
2. 

   Lewis
   June 2nd, 2005 - 18:34

   I also agree. However, why can’t the VFS layer be moved even *further* down so I can use it from my shell?
3. 

   Phil
   June 2nd, 2005 - 18:39

   Hear, hear!

   SFTP should be mountable just like NFS or SMB. None of this application-level GNOME-only stuff.
4. 

   Matthew
   June 2nd, 2005 - 18:50

   I’m pretty naive here, but I’m not sure SFTP supports all the premitives you’d need to do true remote editing. Wouldn’t VFS still need to move the file to a local to a tmp location on open and push it back on saves?
5. 

   Tomasz Torcz
   June 2nd, 2005 - 20:35

   With Linux, one can use FUSE (Filesystem in userspace) which can mount any gnome-vfs-accessible URL like any other filesystem. But that’s Linux-only solution.
   Gnome-vfs must remain crossplatform. It can’t depend on Linux kernel features.
6. 

   Ikke
   June 2nd, 2005 - 20:59

   Check the D-VFS threads on XDG@freedesktop
7. 

   Sean Middleditch
   June 2nd, 2005 - 21:22

   Indeed, D-VFS would be the only way you’d get this to be cross-desktop *and* cross-platform.

   Sadly, with school, I don’t even have time to read mailing lists anymore, much less actually bring D-VFS to fruition. I’m secretly (well, not so secretly now, I guess) hoping that some KIOSlaves and gnome-vfs developers will get together and carry things through to completion.
8. 

   Jon
   June 2nd, 2005 - 21:53

   Someone beat me to it, wiht the XDG thread I’d love vim to be one of the first apps to be gnome-vfs’d up in the mean time. However, as Lewis has said, this sort-of stuff should *not* be X specific! I want this on the shell too!
9. 

   Raphael Bosshard (rboss)
   June 2nd, 2005 - 22:45

   Yes, it sucks. And it blows. And.. whatever.

   The Problem is, that gnome-vfs is a problem itself. It’s to complicated, to overblown. Instead of serving as a simplification layer (easy the pain of connecting to different abstract file systems) it creates a whole bunch of problems.

   Hopefully that will change! The gnome-vfs maintainers promised to create a new, document oriented API (load file, save file, move file, all those convenient functions). But when…?

   So forcing people to adopt gnome-vfs is the wrong way, though I see your point. It’s a bitch.
10. 

    AdamW
    June 2nd, 2005 - 23:10

    As someone else mentioned, there’s several ways to do it on Linux – that I know of, there’s lufs , fuse-sshfs , and the shfs kernel module. I’m currently using fuse-sshfs. Install fuse and fuse-sshfs, then it’s as simple as:

    modprobe fuse
    sshfs hostname:/directory /path/to/mountpoint

    lufs is about the same but seems to be a little slower and buggier, shfs needs to be suid to be really usable so I don’t like that.
11. 

    Jon
    June 2nd, 2005 - 23:16

    Of course, shfs is just SSH, so can’t be compared to gnome-vfs (even though it rocks). Fuse however looks very cool.
12. 

    michel v
    June 3rd, 2005 - 12:43

    In the meanwhile, it would be very nice to have apps distinguish remote resources mounted as local directories. Whoever else experienced the pain of browsing an sshfs mounted directory full of images with Nautilus will understand the need for such a distinction (even based on heuristics) to be made.
    It could be done by checking /etc/mtab and simply disabling the View Thumbnails option for such directories.
13. 

    Sven
    July 15th, 2005 - 02:14

    why ca we not just mount the gnome-vfs things into the normal file-system. But, why is there gnome-vfs then.

    hmm, shouldnt the kernel have a function like a “fluffy”-mountoption – so anyone can mount things where there’s a good chance that it could disappear at any time. Strategy could be to handel a security cache for the files and a very straight write-through.
14. 

    Cliff
    July 28th, 2005 - 06:55

    I’m using FUSE and sshfs and they work great (but as others noted, Linux only). However, the problem is the reverse of gnome-vfs: all my apps *except* Nautilus work fine. Nautilus can see the files, but since it sees that they are not owned by the user who is browsing it (they have the UID and GID of the user on the remote host), it refuses to let the user change them. I was looking for a solution to this when I came across this blog entry.
15. 

    Cliff
    August 3rd, 2005 - 12:55

    Tuomas,

    Ironically, Comcast had a small outage tonight and I temporarily lost Internet for a short while. I had several sshfs filesystems mounted (and was in fact accessing one of them when this occurred. The whole system pretty much came to a standstill, much as if I had really lost a disk (I’ve seen similar effects when an IDE drive failed on me).

    I didn’t get a chance to see what would have happened had I waited because I ended up rebooting.

    I’m wondering how difficult it would have been for FUSE/sshfs to have broken out of this and returned an error rather than just hanging waiting for I/O to complete.
16. 

    John
    February 15th, 2006 - 11:30

    I recently started using sshfs with fuse to overcome this problem. With a bit of tweaking, it’s superb. Totally stable. I now have total access to several boxes via nautilus or any local program. Brilliant stuff!

    If you do decide to try it out, make sure you get the most recent version from the site, the most current version from the fedora repo was too buggy to use. Other than that, very good. Make sure you avoid shfs though (note only one s) as I’ve found this to be very unstable (crashes a lot on unmounting).
17. 

    Rory MCCann
    March 27th, 2007 - 17:24

    sshfs is no long linux specific. It has been ported to Mac OSX and FreeBSD.

    All this gnome-vfs should be removed and replaced with FUSE IMO

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