Steff.me

Foreword

Before I start, this isn’t a technical guide and I won’t go into any depth with how it works. This just shows how to do a quick setup so that you can be up and running in no time at all.

Every day I deal with FTP connections and SSH on a near daily basis; for me it’s important that I can get hold of the information I have on multiple machines and servers easily. While it’s nice enough to use stand-alone file transfer applications, what could be easier than navigating through remote machines through Finder? MacFUSE lets you do just that. Now you can access remote files as if they were on your computer.

What am I on about here?

MacFUSE implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X. It aims to be API-compliant with the FUSE (File System in User Space) mechanism that originated on Linux. Therefore, many existing FUSE file systems become rather easily usable on Mac OS X. The core of MacFUSE is in a dynamically loadable kernel extension and the FUSE user-space library and headers. — MacFUSE installer

Getting started…

First up, install MacFUSE. The current version is MacFUSE Core 0.4 but if you want to use the graphical interface we’ll be installing later download version 0.3 as the most recent version doesn’t work with it yet. You can download MacFUSE Core 0.3 from here.

Installed? Great stuff. Perhaps you should just give it a quick restart to ensure that things are running smoothly. The installer also recommends that you do so, so it seems like a good idea.

Let’s get graphical…

Next up, let’s add a graphical interface to this to make life easier. I have to say that if something can be done with a GUI rather than command line, then I’m all for it. As much as I like the command line, some things are just easier in an easy to use interface. If you look at Google Lab’s website again you can see they’ve released an app named ‘SSHFS’, while that makes it easy to mount SSH another app by the name of MacFusion lets you do this so much easier.

Right now you can use this software to show a Secure Shell or Secure FTP share from another computer on your macs desktop, letting you manipulate the files on it as if they were on your own computer. MacFusion can also do the same for any File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, giving read/write FTP in the finder for the first time! — MacFusion website

Okay, download MacFusion and drag the application into your Applications folder. Now you’re ready to mount your filesystems!

Launch MacFusion and you’ll notice you have a new menubar icon. First up, quick mount.

Click on the menubar icon and then select your option for quick mount, either FTP or SSH. Fill in your details and click OK. Simple.

There’s one thing I should point out at this point. To be able to connect to these FTP and SSH servers, you need to have accepted the footprint (ie: allow your machine to connect). If you connect through a terminal first to a connected you want and accept the footprint, you can then mount them via MacFusion.

If you want to save a connection so that you can keep coming back to it, select “Favourites” then “Edit”. Then just add a new connection as you did with Quick Mount. It’s that easy.

Also, you can make certain filesystems mount when MacFusion is launched by clicking on the ‘Auto’ option in MacFusion Favourites. You can also go to the preferences to adjust how the filesystems mount (eg: unmount on sleep and so forth).

When you have this all set up with the connections you want, you can simply select them to mount. As with any mounted drives or devices, these FTP and SSH filesystems appear on your desktop.

Navigation couldn’t be simpler! You can now access anything on these remote connections easily through the Finder window, as if they were local. You can drag and drop files between them for simple file transfer.

There’s all the basics covered; go mount away! Just remember, be safe.