Getting ready to head to Nuremberg this morning, and wanted to copy some files over to my USB key so I could work on the plane. (Florida to Germany is a bit of a commute, so I might as well have something to do while I’m in a tin can over the Atlantic Ocean, right?)

I’ve got an account with rsync.net (highly recommend) and wanted to copy some files to a fresh system with openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 to transfer to USB. (11.1 looks very good, by the way…)

I didn’t have my rsync scripts handy, so I decided to see about mounting the remote system using FUSE. You can also connect using Webdav in Nautilus and the “fish” protocol in Konqueror, but this method is good if you’re not a desktop user. (For instance, if you have a server running openSUSE and want to mount a filesystem on another server while working over an SSH connection.)

You should have FUSE installed already, but I didn’t have sshfs, so I popped open a terminal and ran this command:

zypper in sshfs

I’d created a directory called “rsync” (not very original, I know) and mounted the remote filesystem using the SSH Filesystem:

sshfs user@host.rsync.net: rsync/

Once that’s done, the remote filesystem is mounted as the directory “rsync” and I can copy and move files just like they’re local. (With, of course, the exception of the fact that they’re being transferred over an Internet connection rather than on local disk — so copying and moving may not be quite as snappy.)

I know a lot of experienced openSUSE users already know this, but I’m guessing a lot of other folks don’t so I thought I’d slap up the instructions since it might be useful for others.