I am trying to create a solution to automatically map/mount a local drive to a remote machine when I login on the remote machine. I need something like SSHFS, but switched round. The remote machine is a *nix machine (practically anything except Windows), while the local machine can be anything (including Windows, after I extend/modify the system to meet my needs).

Does anybody have any idea if something already exists ?

The easiest way is to mount the local machine from the remote one with cifs.

OK, it seems I have to be more specific here....

I am looking for something like Local Drive Mapping in Microsoft's RDP. I want to connect to a remote machine, and authenticate with the remote machine and mount my local hard disk somewhere on that machine automatically without the need to authenticate with the local machine because since I started from the local machine I am already authenticated. Is it possible to do this in the *nix world ?

For centralized authentication you can use LDAP, but that doesn't still help the key point: you need to mount the drive in any way. And when windows is in the middle, the way to go is usually cifs.

I guess you could also use nfs, but I have no idea how good or bad nfs on windows is.

You can use NIS/NYS as well to authenticate on a network.
Anyway, I think I get what you are asking for. You log on (how? SSH?) to a remote machine and that machine automatically mount your local drive. Well there are more than one way to do it.
You can use a script to log on to the remote machine. That script would mount your drive remotely and log you on. You can use port forwarding to forward a locally mounted sshfs, nfs or cifs drive. You can use pam rules to not have to authenticate yourself 2 times. There are several other solutions.

lets make things simpler ... assume that the local machine is NOT windows. That seems to remove some restrictions.

I am not bound to any specific login method/mechanism, but if you know of a solution that restricts me to a particular login method I will not discard it.

I did not really understand this part. Can you kindly explain better please?

Would this restrict me to having to enter username & password of any machine that I can use as my local machine? I am looking for a solution whereby it is not important what machine my local machine is as long as I can connect to the remote machine.

is there a list anywhere that I could consult?

Many thanks for your help

Let's say you want to connect to the remote machine with ssh and log in to bash and have your local sshfs mounted there:

the local connection script would be:
and there should be a remotescript called remotescript: