As you may know, there are a lot of remote filesystems supported by Linux. My personal favourite is SSHFS, a FUSE-based file system which give you capability to mount your remote directory through SSH (Secure SHell) and treat it like a local directory. There are another remote filesystem such as NFS, FlickrFS, or WebDAVFS, etc. I always find that remote filesystems are great tools to enhance your productivity, since you can access all your documents through network and do whatever you need to do with them locally and transparent . And a couple weeks ago, I got the most exiting experience with this tools and I would like to share with you

Currently, my office is working in a project developing a integrated knowledge management system, which consist of an electronic learning system, a document management system, a digital library system and a electronic course management system. All these independent system are tied in a knowledge portal using Single Sign-On system and LDAP as User Management System. Since our client is using a proprietary but popular server operating system, we have to find a OpenLDAP version for that operating system. Unfortunately, OpenLDAP did not perform very well in that operating system, we have experienced random crashes and low performance, which we did not find in the GNU/Linux version . Since the User Acceptance Test is near, we decided to use our own computer with OpenLDAP in GNU/Linux for this testing purpose.

We use Debian 5.0 as operating system because well, we love Debian , and also there is a Debian Repository in our local network We installed OpenLDAP, LAMPP Stack Server, SSH Server and some administrative tools, just in case. I also save 5 (yes, five!!!) DVD ISO Images of Debian 5.0 in my laptop, for install some additional software in the client’s office. This is where the fun part comes by using remote filesystems like SSHFS, you can do some stuffs that maybe, just maybe, a proprietary-but-popular admin can only imagine And from the view of environment sake, by using remote filesystem tools, you can also participate in making a greener planet, because the less DVD you burned then you are reducing plastic waste

All you need is a network connection between your computer running SSH service and server, and of course, SSHFS program. You can install SSHFS by executing commands below:

• in Debian and Derivatives:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

• in openSUSE and SLED system:

sudo zypper install sshfs

• in RHEL and Fedora system:

sudo yum install sshfs

Next step, mount the DVD ISO Images in your computer:

mkdir /home/user/iso

sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop DEBIAN-DVD1.iso /home/user/iso

From your server computer, you can mount the mounted directory by using SSHFS as CDROM

sshfs username@host:/home/user/iso /cdrom

sudo apt-cdrom add

And that’s the trick!, you can make your server assume there is a Debian DVD mounted in the optical drive, and you can add them in your apt sources.list file. The only drawback is you need to mount the remote DVD images every time you want to add them and use them as your repository sources.

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