Amit Singh – you have a new fan.
One thing about OS X that has bugged me is the fact you can’t mount an SSH server as part of the file system. You can mount Windows servers (using Samba), you can mount other Macs, and even NFS, but it wasn’t possible to mount an SSH server. In addition, you can only mount FTP in read only.
I only use SFTP (file transfer over SSH) to upload to servers, and in the past I’ve used Cyberduck or Fugu, but it would be the cat’s meow to just use the Finder.
It’s bugged me because I’ve been able to mount SSH servers in Nautilus on Linux for quite a while. It’s made possible in Linux by an application called FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace).
This incredibly cool fellow, Amit Singh, has ported FUSE to Mac – dubbed MacFUSE. MacFUSE allows you to mount pretty much anything you can think of as a file system on your Mac, but the part I really care about is that it comes with sshfs.
I couldn’t find a nice howto on the project page, so here is a small movie on how to actually mount and unmount an SSH server on your Mac:
Amit Singh, you are my hero. To see some of the cool stuff you can do with MacFUSE check out his demo