Remote disk mounts

With remote disk mounts you can access your CSC directories in a way that resembles the usage of an external disk or USB memory stick. Using this approach normally requires installing some extra software to your local computer, but it also makes the usage very fluent as no scp or other data transfer programs are needed to move files between your local machine and CSC.

On macOS and Linux machines, sshfs can be used to mount certain disk areas at CSC to a user's own machine. With this tool the remote disk areas at the servers of CSC can be used just like local directories. To use sshfs, your local Linux machine must have FUSE and sshfs installed. In the case of macOS, the required packages are macFUSE and SSHFS.

Using sshfs in Linux

Once sshfs is installed on your Linux machine, you can create a remote disk mount with command syntax:

sshfs username@hostname:/path/to/dir /path/to/mountpoint

For example, to make the home directory of user kayttaja on Puhti visible to a local Linux computer, one would execute the following commands on the local machine:

mkdir csc_home
sshfs kayttaja@puhti.csc.fi:/users/kayttaja csc_home

Note

On macOS you might need to add the -o defer_permissions option to the sshfs command in case you are getting Permission denied errors after mounting.

The first command creates an empty directory that will be used as the mount point in the second command. When the remote mount is established, you can use the directory as any directory on your Linux system. For example, to list the contents of the CSC home directory of kayttaja, one could just type the command:

ls csc_home

If no path is specified, the default mounted remote directory is the user's home directory.

To unmount the file system, give the command:

fusermount -u mountpoint

For our example, the command would be:

fusermount -u csc_home

On macOS, replace the fusermount -u command with umount.

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