I have a windows background but always have worked on linux boxes and have used such scp gui applications that allow me to explore the files/dirs very easily and write and read them easily but now that all that I use is Linux I have been using hte command line scp (and rsync) but it is tedious... Is there a nice gui for this, or better yet is there a way you can psuedo mount a file system via ssh? (keep in mind I cannot change anything on the servers, I just have ssh access to them).

Open Konqueror, type fish://hostname, enter username and password.

Basically uses ssh IIRC.

You can also do lan:/ to explore hosts on the local subnet, but you'll probably have to setup the Lisa daemon first. See /etc/lisarc, and comment out the 127... references, replacing with lines referring to your subnet.

HTH.

Fish must not be installed on my system... I just installed Fedoar and chose 'everything' and it apparently doesn't have fish installed. Also the second comment isn't an option as I can't install anything on the servers like I said... (and these servers are not on my subnet, and to make things more difficult I use public key authentication with an ssh-agent not username/password)

It's not a separate application. You type it in the location bar of Konqueror, same place you would type a url to go to a web site, just "fish://..." instead of "http://..." .It operates over ssh. Might work transparently with ssh-agent, but I've not tried it that way.

The "lan" setup is on your machine not the remote boxes, but probably not applicable to what you want to do.

BTW if you're running the default Gnome desktop Nautilus is the file manager and you may have to either search in the menus or invoke Konqueror manually in a terminal window with "konqueror &".

That is what I tried.
I did the fish:// and specified my local server to test it out but to no avail.
Fish is a plugin to konqueror though I think, that was what I was gettign at as far as not being /installed/.
Any other ideas? A setting possibly...

very nice!!

is there a way to use this with another browser/file manager?

mozilla seems not to have it, do you know any others?

As I understand it since Konqueror 3.1. I believe it was developed for Midnight Commander, and may be available for that. Nautilus can do smb://, but not fish:// AFAIK.

I'm puzzled, podollb, if you did a "kitchen sink" Fedora install, as to why fish doesn't work. I've used it at least since RH 9.

If I do Help -> About Konqueror, I get 3.1.4-6. If yours is not up to date, maybe a "yum update Konqueror" is in order. Otherwise, I'm puzzled.

I found an article that said to try this in konqueror:
sftp://hostname
and that worked.
then I found another article about fish that said try:
fish://username@hostname
And that worked.
So I guess you were right it was installed.
But it didn't work with merely:
fish://hostname for some reason (I tried again)
so no big deal, it works so good enough for me.
My only problem is that one server I connect to I use public key (ssh-agent) and I haven't found out how to get the "fish" or "sftp" to work with that, even with port forwarding combinations I tried. Have any ideas?

Must be because you have different usernames on the 2 boxes. It's probably like scp, which assumes that if you don't use "username@" that you want to connect with the same username that you are logged into the originating host with.

Not sure about ssh-agent, but there is a way to set up a pseudo host to connect to with an identity file which has your key. Say you want to connect to a host called tree, then something like:

cd .ssh
vi config as follows:
host tree-2
hostname tree
identity file /path/to/.ssh/id_dsa # assuming a passwordless key in .ssh called "id_dsa"

Then ssh tree-2 uses the private key to authenticate to tree (assuming that the user at tree has the public key in its .ssh/authorized_keys2 file).

Not sure if you would like that vs. using ssh-agent, but it would probably then work to do fish://tree-2, though I haven't tried to test this.

Note: the 2 lines after "host tree-2" in config may need to be indented and don't show that way, but I'm too tired to change the post to html and try to make them do it.