just wanted to add some more notes for those who come after and read this thread.
Snooping around to find a better way of setting up my rsa public key between the 2 servers for the sshfs to work better, i found a nice bit of code that really cuts down on the time and effort setting up the pub/private key pair between systems.
1. On the computer you want to connect FROM generate your rsa key as follows:
Code:
[user@server .ssh]$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/web/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/web/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/web/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
90:83:0a:41:be:cd:1a:9a:75:42:2c:28:84:5b:1d:28 user@server
note this is without a pass phrase. This is a very open key and should be handled with caution. I will be using this as a single use key that is restricted to only mounting a specified mount point via sshfs. It will not be allowed to do any other action.
Once the key pair is generated you will want to get the id_rsa.pub to the computer you want to CONNECT TO. this is the nice bit of code I found this morning.
Code:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@IP
This not only copies the public key to the other end, BUT is also populates the appropriate authorized_keys(2) file depending on the type of key you generate (rsa/dsa) and it just works. You are even told how to test the success of the key copy.
Enjoy this little tidbit and the power of sshfs.
(note on performance)
After mounting the sshfs I performed both a cp -Ravf and a rsync -aviS on that mount point to a /tmp/foo and timed this. The mount point contains roughly 3.3G worth of data and we are on a true gigabit LAN. The remote computer is a very old system running a P4 with 1G RAM, while the newer (local) box is a Dell T3500 with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3503 @ 2.40GHz
4G RAM
so a bit more powerful. Both the cp and the rsync took roughly 1.5min.
Then i ran scp from the other computer to push the same data across the LAN. this took slightly over 2min.
some nice food for thought.