This won’t mean much or even be useful to people who don’t use a unix type operating system. Which means it should work fine for most everyone but Windows users. 🙂
SSH stands for Secure Shell, and is actually a protocol for connecting to a remote machine in a secure manner. You can transfer files over it, and interact as if you were working directly on the remote machine.
SSHFS allows you to mount a remote filesystem over ssh. Then your computer thinks it’s a normal directory full of stuff, but it’s actually the material on the remote server.
I got it working today with relatively minimal trouble, and it’s quite cool. Much faster than I expected.
So… you’re saying you have NFS… but fast 🙂
“unix-type operating system”? You mean *LINUX*. It depends on kernel modules, after all.
I don’t think OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the like are gonna get much mileage outta this one. 🙂
jwise: it’s actually a little slower than normal nfs. The big attraction is both encryption, and mounting a remote server when the only access you have to it is ssh.
Ed: I didn’t think about the module thing. I can’t imagine it would be that hard to do it in OS X though.