VM: sshfs: Remote Disk over SSH setup (Part II)

In part I  we went over all the working parts of the gumstick side - there were quite a few:

• Establishing a reverse-proxy ssh link across the NAT tunnel
• Making it persistent so it automatically rebuilds it's tunnel on power-down's or reboots.
• If the steps worked correctly your reverse-proxy port will automatically show up inside your VPS - available for it to establish the sshfs mount back through it..

Now we are onto setting up the VPS side as per:

VPS (Virtual Private Server)  (part b - 3 steps) $3 / month at: servercheap.net

b-1. Build a sshfs auto-mount back through the raspberry pi zero's reverse proxy.

b-2. Make it auto mounting on reboot and detection (persistence).

b-3. Test the mount if it is a gimmick or production useful.

Lets get started!

• We need to install sshfs, so first get that into your VPS.

sudo yum install sshfs -y 
# or 
sudo apt install sshfs -y

Let's double-check that the gumstick is doing it's part, port 8000 (what we picked) should be automatically opening, and when we check it is:

nmap localhost

We need to sshfs back through the reverse proxy, so it needs the port.

• sshfs needed to be installed on both sides. at your gumstick as well:

sudo apt install sshfs -y

After some trial we did get it to work as in:

sshfs -o default_permissions -p 8000 c@localhost:/home/c/ /home/c/remote/

This gave us the understanding of what this command is doing, namely:

• the /home/user/ directory was being mounted to the home/c/remote/ directory locally.
• Anything that now was copied into the remote directory automatically synced to the other side!

Lets go find this process kill it and try a more root level mount:

ps -aux | grep sshfs

b-2 Making it auto-mount.

• It would only be a matter of duplicating the /toolbox/go.sh as in part 1 and modifying for the sshfs command.

b-3 Is this a gimmick (or actually useful??)

VPS -> gumstick speeds (1.5 MB dropping to 25 KB and back)

gumstick -> VPS speeds (2.0 MB )

Some notes:

• It does not show up on lsblk
• One side automatically syncs to the other transparently.
• It bogs down a single-core VPS when large files are transferring.
• It will show up on a mount -l
• It does indicate the new hard drive size in a df -h!
• This is what we were looking for - the indication of the availability of the 200G+!

Understanding what is happening here:

• When we did test downloads to the VPS it was automatically syncing to the files true holding point on the gumstick (upsync).

Final Test: It worked!!

• A 500 MB file was downloaded to a random spot on the gumstick.
• It was then moved to the /remote linked directory.
• It showed up instantly on the VPS - showing us the directory we were looking at was only being kept on the gumstick but was remote viewable from the VPS!
• One looks to have about a 2MB/s slow server, but you can have Terabytes of information sitting through this. I would be a matter of testing this with larger faster nodes for faster service.