External Drives? Help!

[noxlady]

Hey there,

I could really use some help -- I'm so close to having this figured
out!

My whole goal is to be able to mount external drives connected to my
home eMac from my MacBook when I am away from home. All my media, for
example, is stored on this external drive. I'd like it to be
accessible through the Finder so I can play my songs in iTunes when
away from home. (That's why I'm pursuing this option as opposed to
sftp. If I'm totally off track, please clue me in!)

Here's where I'm at so far:

I've got a public/private key pair installed on my 2 macs. I've got
the router all happy with port forwarding. I've got Mac Fuse installed
and I am able to use either sshfs or MacFusion to get my home folder
on the eMac to mount on my MacBook. (By dragging it to the sidebar, it
now appears there too:) I've tested it by using a neighbor's unsecured
wireless network -- so far so good :)

However, my media is not stored in my home folder. It's on an external
hard drive connected to that computer. So how do I get my external
drives to appear???

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. My comfort level
in terminal is pretty limited (ls, cd, cp, pico...) so if the solution
involves the terminal, put your instructions in verbose mode <grin>
Also, if it does involve the terminal, any ways of automating the
process would also be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks in advance,
Meg :)

[David Jones]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 6:45 PM, noxlady<nox...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (That's why I'm pursuing this option as opposed to
> sftp. If I'm totally off track, please clue me in!)

Nope, you're on the right track! :)

> I've got a public/private key pair installed on my 2 macs. I've got
> the router all happy with port forwarding. I've got Mac Fuse installed
> and I am able to use either sshfs or MacFusion to get my home folder
> on the eMac to mount on my MacBook.

Good, that's the hard part.

>
> However, my media is not stored in my home folder. It's on an external
> hard drive connected to that computer. So how do I get my external
> drives to appear???
>

There are two options:

1. Change the sshfs mount address to have the full path, or
2. Create symlinks in your homedir.

For solution 1, you could simply change from:
ssh://yourlogin@yourmachine:
to:
ssh://yourlogin@yourmachine:/Volumes
and you will see all of the external drives attached to the eMac. You
can also change the path to /Volumes/DiskName if you only wanted to
show the disk named "DiskName." You can find the path for sure using
Terminal, just cd to /Volumes/DiskName, run "pwd", and copy the output
exactly from there.

For solution 2, you would open the terminal to your homedir (~) and
create a symbolic link (symlink) to the external drive within your
home directory. It would look like a subdirectory, but it actually
goes to the disk. To do that, type "ln -s /Volumes/DiskName DiskName".
A symlink is sort of like an alias in Finder, except it is understood
better by Unix-y tools like ssh. It's actually a pretty deep topic,
but these steps should work.

Good luck!
David

[noxlady]

Hey David,

Thanks so much for your prompt reply! I was able to get Option #2
working without any trouble :) However, option #1 *really* sounds more
like what I'm trying to do. I'm having some trouble getting it to
work. I went back to the terminal (fewest possible sources of failure)
and here's what I'm getting:

At the prompt I can enter "ssh emac.someaddress.net" and everything is
rainbows and ponies.
I get the same happy result entering "ssh
myl...@emac.someaddress.net" So far so good.

If I "ssh emac.someaddress.net" I can then "cd /Volumes"

However, if I try to enter "ssh emac.someaddress.net/Volumes", I get
the message:
ssh: connect to host emac.someaddress.net/Volumes port 22: Connection
refused

Ditto if I try "ssh emac.someaddress.net/Volumes/Media"

AAAaaaaaarrrgghhh!

Is there something obvious I'm missing??? Is there some stupid little
permission I've failed to set somewhere? Cause this is *killing* me!

Side question: In terminal, once you've read a man page, how the heck
do you get back to the command prompt?!? I've tried enter, ctl-D, ctl-
C, cmd-. but all I'm getting is an irritable beeping. Then I have to
close that window and open a new terminal session. There's got to be a
more elegant solution!

Thanks for any advice anybody can give me -- obviously I'm a little
out of my depth here. Yay for internet help boards :) :) :)

[Tobias Haeberle]

Am 24.06.2009 um 04:48 schrieb noxlady <nox...@gmail.com>:

Ditto if I try "ssh emac.someaddress.net/Volumes/Media"

AAAaaaaaarrrgghhh!

Is there something obvious I'm missing???

You are missing a ":"

Try:

ssh emac.someaddress.net:/Volumes/Media

[noxlady]

Alas, that didn't work either :( With or without the little colon, I'm
getting a "Connection refused" message :(



On Jun 23, 8:24 pm, Tobias Haeberle <tobias.haebe...@gmail.com> wrote:

[noxlady]

Ok, the weirdness increases...

I *am* able to mount the volumes using MacFusion. I leave the host as
the basic emac.someserver.net and then in the path field I type "/
Volumes/Media" or "/Volumes/Backup". And it works!

However, although both of the drives can be mounted at the same time,
they have the same name on my desktop. I can't have them both in the
sidebar, because the finder thinks they're the same.

Should I go back to DynDNS and just set up a separate host service for
each of my 2 volumes? Or is there something I'm missing?

Also, as a completionist, what is it that I'm doing wrong in the
Terminal?

Thanks again for any tips :)

-- Meg :)

[noxlady]

I finally got it worked out. I guess I'll post this for posterity :)
When you're mounting these remote locations using MacFusion, there's
an attribute called "Volume Name" that you can set under the MacFusion
tab when editing locations. By giving them different names, you can
mount multiple drives using the same DynDNS host and the Finder
perceives them as different volumes :) Yay. Thanks for all your help
folks, I really appreciate it :)

PS. I never did figure out why this wasn't working in Terminal, but my
GUI works so... :)