Ah, Flickr. How we love you. We loved the idyllic pre-Yahoo! days, and held back our tears with the Yahoo! phase of growth. But even when things seem so good, we wonder what the future holds. Microsoft? AOL? An undead uprising?

Now couple our fears with our stupidity. All those photos we uploaded over the past year or two? The ones housed safely on our hard drive? Yeah, right... the hard drive we, in our infinite wisdom, managed to reformat during a routine upgrade?

Flickr, you are our only hope. You hold our memories safe and secure on a server bank. Somewhere. And it's not that we don't trust you. It's Microsoft, AOL, and zombies we have problems with. Sure, some of us could do a mass download from your servers on to our machines. But for others, there's that Microsoft thing again.

We use Linux, and but for one word, we'd be horribly out of luck.

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!

The big splash in the Mac community--and the rest of the world--last week was obviously the iPhone. For Mac users, though, the iPhone announcement may have distracted from the really big news: Amit Singh's release of a MacFUSE beta, his port of the Linux FUSE API to OS X. If you're wondering what, exactly, that means, FUSE stands for Filesystem in USErland, and it provides a generic interface that lets the operating system see virtually anything as a filesystem. Historically, adding new filesystem recognition to an operating system has meant modifying the kernel for each new FS. FUSE, though, provides a single interface that filesystem modules use to interface with the OS. Best of all, anything that provides the correct interface can be interpreted as a filesystem. One enterprising Python programmer even developed a script to let users mount their GMail accounts and use the extra space in their accounts to save files.

What does this mean for Mac users? A lot. First and foremost, the FUSE NTFS driver seems to work with MacFUSE, so we can finally use NTFS volumes as well as FAT volumes. Web developers and anyone else who manages files via SFTP should rejoice, too. SSHFS (included with the MacFUSE binary) allows users to mount a remote SSH/SFTP directory as if it were a local disk. That means no more synchronizing files with an SFTP client. And while the GMailFS python bindings need a little work, the fixes look trivial, and soon we should all be able to put our extra GMail space to better use.

Amit doesn't think that MacFUSE is ready for production use yet, hence the "b" after the version number, so if you're using it for anything important, make sure you've got backups. If you do run into trouble with it, updates are being released almost daily at the moment. That said, though, my trials of it seem pretty stable. The only issues I've seen have been network related. If the system doesn't get a response to a remote query, it will hang. That can mean the dreaded "Spinning Beachball" in the Finder. In most cases, the problem eventually clears itself. If you're navigating via the shell, a simple Ctrl-C cancels the hanging action.

So how do you get MacFUSE up and running for yourself? Glad you asked.