The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

Posted Mar 20, 2007 23:25 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop by k8to
Parent article: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

I doubt it's usefull for large numbers of users, but for my personal stuff the fuse-based Sshfs is a superior replacement to NFS or Samba.

Faster, strong encryption, strong authentication aviable, trivially easy to setup. Robust.

The downside is that you can't use it for anything that requires special file typs, like named pipes. So ~/ is out. No booting from it. But for serving up large media files or sharing abritrary directories between computers it's great.

The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

Posted Mar 21, 2007 15:53 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

You've mentioned this before in response to my discussing of issuses encountered trying to use NFS for similar purposes.

My response is still that sshfs is a great thing, and pretty useful for trivial tasks, or remote manipulation of low-bandiwidth, high-latency small set sof files. It's much easier to edit some remote configuration thing with a local tool via sshfs than most anything else.

But sshfs still can't handle a variety of normal file sharing activities reasonably. It fails entirely on mmap and large files make it choke because it hasn't got sufficient cache sophistication. Over a LAN you'll never get 10% of your throughput while maxing your CPUs on the ciphers. If the ssh link actually goes down (this happens), the whole thing gets very unhappy and it is impossible to recover.

Basically the only thing that makes sshfs "better" than the traditional lousy network filesystems we love to hate is that it has a well defined focus. It's a no-server-configuration filesystem for accessing small numbers of smallish files without high performance expectations. It is a remarkably pleasant tool when used inside its scope, but one of the reasons it is pleasant is it has a much narrower scope.