Set proper rights for sshfs mountpoint so it can be shared with samba

Question

I have a domain hoster that provides access via SSH.

My platforms are:

• Gentoo 2.6.36-r5
• Windows (XP/Vista/7)

I work on my Windows, I use Gentoo to do all the magic Windows can't do.

Therefore I use sshfs to mount the remote public directory for my domain to /mnt/mydomain.com. Authentication is done via keys, so lazy me don't have to type in my password every now and then.

Since I do my coding on Windows, and I don't want to upload/download the changed files all the time, I want to access this /mnt/mydomain.com via a samba share.

So I shared /mnt in samba, all mounts except mydomain.com is listed on my Windows Explorer.

My theories are:

1. sshfs does not set the mountpoint uid/gid to something that samba expects
2. samba does not know that it has to include the uid/gid that /mnt/mydomain.com has been set.
3. All above is wrong, and I don't know.

Here are configs and output from console, need anything else just let me know. Also no errors or warnings that I take notice of being relevant to this issue, but I might be wrong.

gentoo ~ # ls -lah /mnt
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x  9 root  root  4.0K Mar 26 16:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root  root  4.0K Mar 26  2011 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root     0 Feb  1 16:12 .keep
drwxr-xr-x  1 root  root     0 Mar 18 12:09 buffer
drwxr-s--x  1 68591 68591 4.0K Feb 16 15:43 mydomain.com
drwx------  2 root  root  4.0K Feb  1 16:12 cdrom
drwx------  2 root  root  4.0K Feb  1 16:12 floppy
drwxr-xr-x  1 root  root     0 Sep  1  2009 services
drwxr-xr-x  1 root  root     0 Feb 10 15:08 www

/etc/samba/smb.conf

[mnt]
comment = Mount points
writable = yes
writeable = yes
browseable = yes
browsable = yes
path = /mnt

/etc/fstab

sshfs#[email protected]:/home/to/pub/dir/ /mnt/mydomain.com/ fuse comment=sshfs,noauto,users,exec,uid=0,gid=0,allow_other,reconnect,follow_symlinks,transform_symlinks,idmap=none,SSHOPT=HostBasedAuthentication 0 0

For an easier read:

• [email protected]
• /home/to/pub/dir/
• /mnt/mydomain.com/

options:

• comment=sshfs
• noauto
• users
• exec
• uid=0
• gid=0
• allow_other
• reconnect
• follow_symlinks
• transform_symlinks
• idmap=none
• SSHOPT=HostBasedAuthentication

Help!

Solution 1

sshfs is a FUSE-based filesystem, and the FUSE layer does not allow other users to access its mounts by default, for security purposes. You have allow_other in options, but it will be ignored until you also edit /etc/fuse.conf to include user_allow_other.

Solution 2

Why don't you mount sshfs directly from Windows?
There are couple of free solution for that (see here and here for more info).

Comments

[user1686]

IIRC, HostbasedAuthentication is not recommended to use (the user-based PubkeyAuthentication is preferred)

[Tom Hale]

SSHFS version 2.8 fuse: unknown option 'SSHOPT=HostBasedAuthentication'

[CS01]

When exec'ing "ps aux", left column states root for both sshfs and smbd processes. I "parse" this as both runs with the same privileges. From the ls -lah output, you see the uid is not root, this uid is set by sshfs, but I can't set it, atleast not with changing uid/gid in options. I believe samba somehow think it has to exclude that specific directory with uid/gid 68591. (Trying to clear some confusion on my part.)

[CS01]

Wow, this tool is great!

[user1686]

@CS01: The "master" smbd runs as root, but that is not true for connection handlers – if you log in over SMB as "jim", your smbd process also switches to the UID of "jim".

[sweisgerber.dev]

They don't look very promising and are suspended, at least now, after 3 years :) Do you have any stability experience with them?

[sweisgerber.dev]

You also need to map the UID and/or GID to your desired user(s) via the options uid=<UID>,gid=<GID>.

[bruin]

Thanks all for the answers. so to summarize, after tested on a recent version of Ubuntu: 1. update /etc/fuse.conf; 2. specify THREE sshfs command options (-o allow_other -o uid=<UID> -o gid=<GID>). It seems no need to restart smbd (but I am not sure since I restarted smbd anyway).