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Robert
Asked: 2012-04-19 11:16:10 +0800 CST

sshfs is mounting filesystems as another user

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So I am trying to mount a folder from another computer in my LAN, and I am able to ssh without any issues. But, I am unable to make any changes when I access the mounted folder.

This is what I have done so far:

Install:

$sudo apt-get install sshfs
$sudo modprobe fuse
$sudo adduser <username> fuse
$sudo chown root:fuse /dev/fuse
$sudo chmod +x /dev/fuse
$mkdir ~/remoteserv

And when I access the remote folder via sshfs:

$sshfs -o idmap=user <username>@<ipaddress>:/home/user ~/remoteserv

The output of becomes:

$~/remoteserv$ ls -l
total 60
drwxr-xr-x 1 <notmyusername> <notmyusername> 4096 2012-04-13 21:54 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 1 <notmyusername> <notmyusername> 4096 2012-04-10 13:05 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 1 <notmyusername> <notmyusername> 4096 2012-04-17 19:06 Downloads
drwxr-xr-x 1 <notmyusername> <notmyusername> 4096 2012-04-13 21:55 Music
drwxr-xr-x 1 <notmyusername> <notmyusername> 4096 2012-04-03 15:07 Pictures
... more of the same

I am unable to access any of the files properly because sshfs is mounting the files under my wife's username! I have no idea why, and I feel like I have made a large mistake somewhere. Is there some configuration file which I need to tweak somewhere? I can't seem to find anything on the manpage :/

I even tried an -o allow_other option when I mounted, but it still mounted it under my wife's username! What is going on?

permissions mount sshfs users

2 Answers

  1. It's worth a try to explicitly set the UID/GID. This could be done, for example, using the sshfs options:

    uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)

    or

    uid=$(id -u someuser),gid=$(id -g somegroup)

    See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSHFS#Secure_user_access for more details.

    • 24

  2. The complete command is

    sshfs \
-o uid=`id -u username` \
-o gid=`id -g username` \
-o allow_other \
[email protected]:/target/folder \
/local/folder

    it maps username's user_id and group_id to the mountpoint (so the mountpoint looks like that user's own). The allow_other allows others to use this mountpoint which is good if the root mounts the folder for someone else.

    Alternatively you can use -o allow_root to let root there too.

    • 3