MacFUSE & SSHFS
I tried out MacFUSE and SSHFS a few months ago when I started to work remotely. While the connection speed was much faster than SMB, the connections weren’t very stable. Any type of network disruption (including sleep) would cause the machine to lock up. The only way to get operation of the machine back to normal was by rebooting (ick!). After a couple of days of that, no amount of speed increase was worth it; I had to go back to SMB.
Recently, I’ve been getting fed up with the slowness of SMB again, so I thought I’d check on the status of MacFUSE and see if they’d made any progress. Lucky for me, they had been working very hard on it. The most recent version of MacFUSE is much more stable. It doesn’t lock up my machine any more. Now when it loses a connection, it displays a window asking if you want to try to reconnect on to eject. This is a huge improvement.
Everything isn’t sunshine and roses though. While it doesn’t lock up the machine, the reconnection dialog has never worked for me. In order to reconnect, I have to cd out of any mounted directories in any open shells, then unmount and remount. I guess I’ll see in the next few days if this remaining annoyance drives me batty. Hopefully some day soon they’ll have a fix for this as well.
