Tech Scribblings

Holy cow, this about blew my mind. I was working on a simple little website that had no FTP access so I was just planning on copying all the files down to check out the site and see how things were working. Obviously it is not fun to do that. Well I did have SSH access to the server and so I was trying to see what images were which, well, I didn’t really want to scp all the files I wanted to preview one-by-one. Oh, and I didn’t have root access and wasn’t sure if it had NFS available or not. That’s when I found out about sshfs!

With sshfs I can mount all the files locally over an SSH connection! To do this I:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Edit /etc/modules and add a line that says ‘fuse’ if it is not there already

Add myself to the fuse user group:

sudo adduser username fuse

Then just mount the filesystem:

sshfs username@host:/path/to/remote/files /media/mount-point

Then to unmount do:

fusermount -u /media/mount-point

That’s it. It was so nice to work on all the files using my local tools and apps. Obviously this is not the best idea for changing a production server but it just provides a little nicer look at the remote files.

I had installed Adobe Reader to replace the default eVince document viewer. The problem was that PDFs I opened in Nautilus still opened with eVince. I wanted to know how to fix it so it would always open with Adobe Reader.

In order to do that you need to navigate to the file you want to open with a certain program in Nautilus. Right click on the file and click on Properties. Open the “Open With” tab. Select the program you want to open the file.

Thats it! So easy, and much better than the Windows way of doing it, you just have to know where to go.