I use Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud heavily for personal development projects as well as at work for Globalme. I have been using scp to transfer files but that can get painful if you need to transfer files often. Looking for an easier solution, I found fuse + sshfs which can make file transfers a blast!. Using sshfs, you can mount your EC2 drive locally which can be a great time saver. I am using Ubuntu locally but fuse, sshfs and other required packages are available for other common distros as well.
We start with by installing the required packages
sudo aptitude install build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev libfuse-dev comerr-dev libfuse2 libidn11-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libldap2-dev libselinux1-dev libsepol1-dev pkg-config fuse-utils sshfs
Add yourself to the fuse user group otherwise you will get a “permission denied” error later down the road
sudo usermod -a -G fuse your_username
Create a folder on your machine to be used as the mount point for the Amazon EC2 drive
sudo mkdir /mnt/ec2
Make yourself owner of this folder
sudo chown your_username:fuse /mnt/ec2
And finally mount your EC2 drive to the location. We will use the Amazon identity file. If you run the command without “-o IdentityFile,” remote machine will return “Connection reset by peer”
sshfs -o IdentityFile=Your_Identity_File.pem remoteu[email protected]_host_address:/host_location_to_mount /mnt/ec2
One important thing to note… At my initial attempts mount was working fine but I kept getting the error message “You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of “ec2mount” when I tried to browse the mount point. I was running the sshfs command with sudo which caused permission conflicts with the remote user account. Leaving the sudo out kept the fuse and remote permissions in peace and I was able to browse.
A similar approach can be used for mounting an Amazon S3 Simple Storage bucket. You can find the instructions for that at this blog post Installing FUSE + s3fs and sshfs on Ubuntu
In my Fedora there is no group called fuse. I think it was removed since F9. So, I just ignored him and used my own user group .
great man, thanks a lot, it works like a charm (ubuntu 12.04), just a note for dummies (like me): “host_location_to_mount” is to be replaced by the path on the remote machine you want to mount