Mounting remote filesystems via sshfs

If you have access to a remote computer via ssh , it is possible to mount your home directory on the remote machine locally.

Let us assume the following.

You have an account on a remote machine A with IP a.a.a.a and you are working on a local machine B. You want to mount the your home directory on A to a folder on B. I am also assuming that both the machines are running Ubuntu/Debian.

Step 1

On machine A install open-ssh server.

$ sudo apt-get install open-sshserver

Step 2

Ensure that you are able to log in to A from B via ssh

$ ssh fermi@a.a.a.a

This will prompt you with a key finger print of A and ask you whether you want to add this key to the list of trusted machines. Accept the key. Now it will prompt for the password on the remote machine.
Log out from A by typing logout.

Step 3

Install sshfs and fuse-utils on the local machine B.

$ sudo apt-get install fuse-utils sshfs

Step 4
The sshfs package can mount remote directories / filesystems via fuse. (FUSE is file systems in user Space). On ubuntu , you must be a member of fuse group to access FUSE.
You can manually edit /etc/groups to add your user name to fuse group. Or it can be done from System->Administration->Usersand Groups on Gnome desktop ( on ubuntu).

Step 5
Create a directory on the local machine.

$mkdir remote_dir

Now, mount the remote directory.

$ sshfs fermi@a.a.a.a: remote_dir

(There is a colon after the IP address above) . You home directoy on the remote machine A will be visible under remote_dir folder.

You can unmount the remote directory with the following command.

$ fusermount -u remote_dir