Best way to mount a remote Ubuntu server?

[richardb]

Hey all, I have a Freenas system at home that is now running nicely. I'd like to connect that to a hosted server I have to grab files from it. At the moment, I am using Rsync on a CRON job, but that is being a bit of a pain as there are a lot of small files on the remote server, which causes lots of network overhead as the rsync process compares the files. Plus, some have long file names, which seems to confuse Rsync for some reason.

So, I'd like to see if it would be possible to mount the remote server as a remote volume on the Freenas box, so a script can access it like a local volume and grab files. I've looked at using SSHFS, but that's not supported directly on Freenas. Using NFS is possible, but I am not sure about the security of that over the Internet. Is there anything else that you might suggest that I look into? Are there other supported or recommended solutions?

Thanks all!

 

[cyberjock]

Umm... use CIFS? Use the mount command... That's how I moved data from my Windows server to a FreeNAS server. Shared the Windows server and did a local cp copy from the Windows CIFS share to my fresh new zpool. Got like 95% of line speed when copying large files.

 

[richardb]

The server is a remote hosted server, not on the local network. So, CIFS wouldn't work.

 

[cyberjock]

sftp?

If you do an ssh session you could pipe almost any protocol you want through it...

 

[achianese]

Look into Unison. It uses the rsync protocol for file updates but compares the replicas using locally stored libraries so network overhead is low. It's made to do bidirectional sync but you can force rsync-like behavior. There are freebsd binaries; search for the thread on this forum. Not sure if long file names would still be a problem.

 

[richardb]

Thanks for the pointers, all. I am going to look into a few options:

- NFS over SSH Tunnel
- Unison

I think the first one will be the best, as the speed of access isn't critical, but the immediate response of a live filing system would be useful to have.