What's needed to use sshfs?

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#1

What’s needed to use sshfs? Eg something special to enable sftp? What’s best practice?
Both local and remote are tumbleweed:

  $  sshfs -p995 10.33.88.88:. mnt/88
Enter passphrase for key '/home/me/.ssh/id_rsa':
read: Connection reset by peer
*  1$  sshfs -p995 -odebug,sshfs_debug,loglevel=debug 10.33.88.88:. mnt/88
...
Enter passphrase for key '/home/me/.ssh/id_rsa': 
Authenticated to 10.33.88.88 ([10.3.88.88]:995) using "publickey".
debug1: channel 0: new [client-session]
debug1: Requesting no-more-sessions@openssh.com
debug1: Entering interactive session. 
debug1: pledge: network
debug1: client_input_global_request: rtype hostkeys-00@openssh.com want_reply 0
debug1: Remote: /home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys:10: key options: agent-forwarding port-forwarding pty user-rc x11-forwarding
debug1: Remote: /home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys:10: key options: agent-forwarding port-forwarding pty user-rc x11-forwarding
debug1: Sending environment.
debug1: channel 0: setting env LANG = "en_US.utf8"
debug1: channel 0: setting env LC_TIME = "en_DK.utf8"
debug1: Sending subsystem: sftp
subsystem request failed on channel 0 
read: Connection reset by peer
  1$
#2

I have no experience w/ this, but I found (comment #5)

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=83124

#3

@gregrwm:

On my system, the sshfs package got pulled in by KDEConnect –

 > rpm --erase --test sshfs
error: Failed dependencies:
        sshfs >= 3.7.2 is needed by (installed) kdeconnect-kde-22.12.3-bp155.1.6.x86_64
 >

There’s no man page but, “sshfs --help” spits out a load of information related to the options.

There is a man page on the network: <https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/sshfs.1.html>
There’s also a Wikipedia entry: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS>

But, the ArchWiki entry is interesting: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SSHFS>

Note: This project has been archived by its developers and is no longer developed. Alternatives include the mount feature of rclone.

#4

Yeah, the git repo for fuse notes that sshfs is orphaned:

The troubleshooting info that I’ve found related to the request failed error suggests looking at the ssh logs on the server side, and that it may be a configuration issue on the server side.

#5

On openSUSE the sshd daemon by default is configured with

Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/ssh/sftp-server

maybe check if that’s the case on your target system.

2 Likes
#6

Fascinatingly my tumbleweeds were installed with nothing in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Upon adding Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/ssh/sftp-server
sshfs works. Thanks to you who chipped in.

2 Likes
#7

@gregrwm No it’s there, Tumbleweed merged etc items into /usr/etc…

fgrep -r sftp-server /usr/etc/*
/usr/etc/ssh/sshd_config:Subsystem	sftp	/usr/libexec/ssh/sftp-server

I also had no issues testing sshfs on Tumbleweed and MicroOS.

#8

Mine also have /usr/etc/ssh, but /etc/libssh/libssh_server.config only contain

# Parse OpenSSH configuration file for consistency
Include /etc/ssh/sshd_config

so mine haven’t been using /usr/etc/ssh/sshd_config. And my /etc/ssh/sshd_config had nothing. Likely a config bug back when i installed sometime in 2022…likely got fixed sometime since then.

#9

No, it is a bug introduced by /usr/etc move.

No, it is not fixed as you see and it will not be fixed until someone reports it.

The default configuration file for OpenSSH was moved to /usr/etc, but libssh was not updated to include it. You need to open bug report against libssh.

#10

Bug Report: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211718

https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1102389

1 Like
#11

Thank you, but usrmerge is something entirely different. This will be confusing to whoever reads this changelog in the future. There is no merging of /etc and /usr/etc.

#12

@arvidjaar

- Add fix to spec file for wrong include path as a result of the
  default openSSH move to /usr/etc, (boo#1211718).
#13

Thanks for patching it. I commented on the SR and wonder if it’s right to replace the /usr/etc include with an /etc one - if I understand correctly, both paths should be included, to combine packaged configurations with administrative/custom ones.

However I’m not sure if libssh supports overrides.

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_UsrEtc

#14

Hi All
I’ve also raised an issue upstream https://gitlab.com/libssh/libssh-mirror/-/issues/207

#15

I think I might have found something on this, though not a full solution. Apparently, in OpenSSH 9.0, the scp program uses SFTP protocol under the hood. If the destination system doesn’t have sftp-server installed (or available, for example, if it’s using dropbear), then there may be an additional option needed.

For example, on scp, you need to use -O to force the legacy behavior.

I wonder if something similar may be needed to get sshfs to work using the legacy behavior rather than trying to use sftp.