[TriLUG] problems with AFS via sshfs

[Tom Roche]

How to do, or refresh, a long-term sshfs mount of AFS space?
What I mean:

This semester I have no courses with windows-only dependencies, so I
have migrated pretty much everything to my ubuntu laptop. Among other
things this means that the UNC AFS mounts that I keep open with the
OpenAFS client on my winxp box I keep open with sshfs on ubuntu.
sshfs works great for several hours, but eventually I get errors like

me at it:~/afs/UNC/weinberg/400$ ls -al
> ls: cannot open directory .: Transport endpoint is not connected
me at it:~/afs/UNC/weinberg/400$ sudo sshfs me at isis.unc.edu:/afs/isis.unc.edu/home/w/e/weinberg/public_html/400 /home/me/afs/UNC/weinberg/400
> me at isis.unc.edu's password:
> fuse: mountpoint is not empty
> fuse: if you are sure this is safe, use the 'nonempty' mount option
me at it:~/afs/UNC/weinberg/400$ popd
me at it:~$ sudo sshfs -o nonempty me at isis.unc.edu:/afs/isis.unc.edu/home/w/e/weinberg/public_html/400 /home/me/afs/UNC/weinberg/400
> me at isis.unc.edu's password:
> fuse: bad mount point `/home/me/afs/UNC/weinberg/400': Permission denied

The only way I've found to restore the mount is to logout/login, which
requires reloading my firefox tabs (which I abuse) and emacs desktop
(ditto). On winxp I just use the OpenAFS client to get new tokens, but I
don't see how to do that via sshfs. (Unfortunately the OpenAFS install
on linux seems like much heavier lifting--IIRC it requires a cache
partition--so I'd like to avoid that if possible.) So for now I either
take the logout/login hit, or just scp if that's all I need.

I'm wondering, is there a better way? Either to

* mount the AFS space self-maintaining-ly? FWIW I've got an entry in
  my fstab.

* refresh the AFS mount without logout/login?

TIA, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>