Tag Archives: NFS

sshfs – A tool to mount a remote folder locally through SSH

Sometimes it can be handy to be able to mount a folder in another computer, as if it was local, just having a SSH connection.

This is what sshfs tool does.

If you’re able to ssh to a host, then you’re able to mount a remote folder to you local computer.

In Ubuntu simply do:

sudo apt install sshfs

Then mount the remote dir with:

sshfs yourremoteuser@remotehost:/route /localmountpoint

After this you’ll be able to ls, cp, mv… and do any command as if it was your local folder, or a NFS remote mounted folder.

Bear in mind that if your Internet connection drops, the mount point will be inaccessible and any IO operation will take forever.

Troubleshooting a shell prompt irresponsible that locks/hangs intermittently

You do df -h or ls / and the terminal freezes and not even CTRL + C works, you have a lock.

Normally this is due to a lock of the system trying to perform an IO.

Could be a physical spinning disk failing, but the most probably nowadays is that you have a network mount point and it is timing out.

If you execute mount and you get a timeout, and when you finally see the list you see a NFS, iSCSI or another kind of Network mount (you will see an Ip Address), check for errors.

To do this in CentOS/RHEL you can do as root:

dmesg | grep -i "timed"

or depending on the System

cat /var/log/messages | grep -i "timed"

You’ll get something like this:

[root@compute01 carles]# dmesg -T | grep timed | head -n5
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:44 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out
[Fri Mar 20 02:27:45 2020] nfs: server storage07 not responding, timed out

Please note I use dmesg -T in order to have human readable date instead of Unix Epoch.

You can count the errors today:

[root@compute01 carles]# dmesg -T | grep time | grep "Mon Apr 6" | wc --lines
3123