Works best with Linux
remotefs is a network file system designed for use with home NAS. Simple to use, few dependencies, reasonable security, completely in user space.
The reasons i've decided to make it are a) samba isn't working for me at all b) NFS is not working well for me c) sshfs is great, but not very fast. So if you have troubles with samba and NFS (as I do), then you may be interested in remotefs.
It is provided with packages for i386/amd64 Debian-based systems, i386/amd64 Redhat-based systems, one package for OpenWrt-based systems (server only). See downloads section for the list of available packages. Build scripts are available in Git, so you could make packages for your plastform(s) if you wish so.
I've built only package for hardware i have, so it is guranteed to work. You might refer to OpenWrt trunk snapshots for updated packages.
remotefs only translates the filesystem from remote host to your local host. To do that, the original file-owning user on the remote host is substituted by the local host user who has actually mounted an export via remotefs.
This is may look too simple, but this is enough for tasks performed by my home NAS. My NAS is single-user and i'm always running remotefs as root on LAN interface (invisible from outside network). So translating root's files' permissions to alex's permissions works just fine and so it will work fine for any other NAS user.
But if you need something more complex, like transferring a home directory from a remote host, you may define users on a per-export basis. After an export is mounted on the local host, remotefs will lower its privileges to specified user (and/or group) and gain this user’s privileges on the remote host. Since home directory usually has its user's permissions, you should not have any permission problems with this translation.
Main rfsd process still needs to be run as root to do chroot() properly.
If "ugo" (UGO stands for User-Group-Other) option is specified for some export, rfsd will log the user into the server’s OS. It's like remote shell, but without the actual shell, just for file access.
In this mode server will report real files' owner and group. See MAN pages (rfsd(8), rfs(1)) for possible side-effects. rfsd's option -u is ignored for this mode.
Official recomendation for remotefs is to keep it away from untrusted networks. You normally setup rfsd to listen to local network. If you absolutely need to use it over the Internet, you should at least firewall the connection with a specific IP-address.
Please consider this advice seriously. remotefs security is reasonable for LAN, not bulletproof.
BTW, rfsd will warn you about listening to interface that is not local and will refuse to run until -q option is provided, or local interface specified.
If you interested in the project or feel there's a feature missing, or have suggestions or any remarks, we'd be glad to hear from you by e-mail at aleksey_t@users.sourceforge.net or jjsarton@users.sourceforge.net.