[TriLUG] problems with AFS via sshfs

[Brian Templeton]

Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com> writes:

> 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.

Installing OpenAFS is really not difficult on Debian/Ubuntu; while it
does require an ext[234] filesystem for the cache, you can just use a
loopback-mounted filesystem. HCoop's instructions are a good guide if
you haven't installed AFS on Debian/Ubuntu before:

<http://wiki.hcoop.net/MemberManual/TransferringFiles/OpenAFS/Debian>

As for your sshfs problem, I'd guess that your kerberos tickets in the
remote ssh session are expiring. The best solution would be to use a
local AFS install, but have you tried unmounting your AFS directory with
fusermount -u?

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