Secure Remote Disks SSHFS for Mac the Made Easy

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Freeware

Secure Remote Disks SSHFS for Mac the Made Easy

by Jay Savage Jan 17th 2007

Thanks to reader Jan for pointing this out. Actually, unless I'm mistaken, thanks to reader Jan for creating this!

If you've installed MacFUSE and SSHFS either from source or using the installer, Secure Remote Disks is a little (<500K) Cocoa GUI to help automate mounting remote ssh directories. As you can see from the screencap, SRD will store a list of servers together with mount points, user names, and even port numbers for those connecting to servers on remote ports.

Best of all, unlike the commandline sshfs, SRD will create mount points if they don't already exist and, best of all, it correctly interfaces with finder's eject/unmount function so you can drag mounted ssh volumes to the trash or hit the eject button in a Finder window to unmount them.

This is an Alpha release, so be careful. That said, Jan's code seems solid so far.

Here are some hints for putting SRD though its paces:

The current SRD returns no error messages of any kind; a connection failure will silently dump you in a Finder window of your home directory. The most likely culprit is (as always) your password, but be prepared to troubleshoot the connection blind.
SRD will mount remote directories under /Volumes. The sample connection the pops up on first launch even has a path under /Volumes. Servers mounted under /Volumes can't be unmounted, though, so choose a mount point somewhere else, as in the screencap above, unless you want to have to logout of OS X to disconnect from the remote server.
Mount points will are not removed when volumes are unmounted, so make sure you don't accedentally start using the mount points for other purposes.
There is no way to reopen the connect dialog if you close it (i.e. File->New Window). If you hit the red button, close SRD and relaunch it.

Thanks Jan!

Tags: FUSE, MacFUSE, OS X, OsX, Secure Remote Disk, Secure REmote Disks, SecureRemoteDisk, SSHFS

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