Colocation to Virtualization

Above are the common protocols supported, but there is support for more. Using GVFS to mount the remote filesystem to yours allows you to create and move files to and from the remote system using typical “cp”, “rm”, and “mv” commands. This makes things even easier if you are working through an X windows console. Just bring up the remote directory structure through a file manager application and work from there. Gnome also uses GVFS to manage USB based storage. The following will go through manually connecting to a server using GVFS.Move into the “.gvfs” filesystem in the users home directory. Unless Gnome has automatically mounted a device, this filesystem should be empty.

user01@LinuxDesk:~$ cd ~/.gvfs

In the below example, a remote servers filesystem will be mounted over an SSH/SFTP session.

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs$ gvfs-mount ssh://user05@SftpServer02
Enter password
Password:

Verify that the location has been mounted.

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs$ ls
sftp for user05 on SftpServer02

The SFTP was mounted and we can now traverse the remote servers filesystem as if it were our own.

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs$ cd sftp\ for\ user05\ on\ SftpServer02/

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs/sftp for user05 on SftpServer02$ ls
app  boot  etc   hs_err_pid15240.log  lib         media  mnt  opt   relay  sbin     srv  tmp  var
bin  dev   home  hs_err_pid8660.log   lost+found  misc   net  proc  root   selinux  sys  usr

Since we logged into the SSH/SFTP system using user “user05″, we can write to any direcotry that remote user has access to.

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs/sftp for user05 on SftpServer02$ cd home/user05/

Below creates a new file “asdf” containing the text “asdfasdf”. Here we are just testing write capability to the remote server

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs/sftp for user05 on SftpServer02/home/user05$ echo "asdfasdf" > asdf
user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs/sftp for user05 on SftpServer02/home/user05$ cat asdf
asdfasdf

“gvfs-mount” can also be used to list all currently mounted gvfs systems. Below shows only the sftp session.

user01@LinuxDesk:~$ gvfs-mount -l
Mount(0): sftp on SftpServer02 -> sftp://SftpServer02/
  Type: GDaemonMount

For reference, the following shows my 4gig USB drive that was automatically mounted when attached to the workstation through Gnome.

user01@LinuxDesk:~$ gvfs-mount -l
Drive(0): USB Drive
  Type: GProxyDrive (GProxyVolumeMonitorHal)
  Volume(0): 4.1 GB Media
    Type: GProxyVolume (GProxyVolumeMonitorHal)
    Mount(0): 4.1 GB Media -> file:///media/disk
      Type: GProxyMount (GProxyVolumeMonitorHal)
Mount(0): sftp on SftpServer02 -> sftp://SftpServer02/
  Type: GDaemonMount

GVFS mount points can be un-mounted using the “-u” argument. Below will un-mount the remote ssh server.

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs$ gvfs-mount -u ssh://user05@SftpServer02

Notes: GVFS contains one master daemon (gvfsd) which tracks current GVFS mounts. Each mount is created as an individual daemon with it’s own process. Knowing this, we can find the actual gvfsd process ID that the sftp connection is running under.

user01@LinuxDesk:~/.gvfs$  ps -ef | grep gvfsd-sftp
user01  8022     1  0 10:34 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-sftp --spawner :1.8 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/21