NFS/Samba alternative: Mount remote directory over SSH.

It is possible to mount a remote directory as a local file system through SSH by using SSHFS, which is based on FUSE: a library to create filesystems in userspace. There are many other files system based on FUSE .

Advantage:

Secure and easy to setup, only client side needs install SSHFS and FUSE, the server side just needs SSH server with sftp support.

Disadvantage:

Performance Penalty, because data transferred has to be encrypted and decrypted, which is time consuming and CPU intensive.

Install:

Search and install sshfs using package management tool of your Linux flavour.

Example:

- Mount any remote dir:

sshfs user@server:dir /mnt/sshfs

Only root and users in fuse group can use this command.

- Unmount sshfs

fuserumount -u /mnt/sshfs

or

umount /mnt/sshfs (root user only)