[LUGSB] Using Nautilus on campus

[Aaron Pellman-Isaacs]

On OSX (on intel at least), you can use MacFUSE and the ssh fuse module 
now, though it doesnt seem to support key-based login yet...
--Aaron
Michael F. Lamb wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm sure most of you already know this, it's pretty trivial if you've 
> been a unix geek forever but maybe it will be useful for someone new 
> to Linux or to the SB campus. For your consideration:
>
> The gnome file manager "nautilus" has a really cool feature that 
> allows it to show you ssh or samba connections as plain old file 
> systems. This can come in really handy on campus. Lets you 
> drag-and-drop files from your machine to your SB drive (for quick 
> printing turnaround time in the SINC sites) or from your second linux 
> box to any random other computer. Basically if you can use 'ssh' to 
> access a computer, or a mac can access it with "connect to server... 
> smb://," then there's a good chance nautilus will let you see the 
> files on it in a nice drag-and-drop way.
>
> A MacOS machine can do something similar to connect to a samba share 
> (as described in http://ic.sunysb.edu/helpdesk/sbmac.shtml) but I 
> don't think they have native access to any machine running ssh like we 
> do. (Heh heh heh!)
>
> This feature of nautilus used to be a bit flaky and crashy, but I've 
> been using it a lot lately with good results, so I'll describe it here.
>
> Starting Nautilus
> -----------------
>
> If you're a Gnome user, you can just open up your "Blah's home" or 
> "Computer" on your desktop somewhere, maybe there's a "File Manager" 
> option in the menus. If you're a command line guy like me, the best 
> way to launch nautilus is: "nautilus --no-desktop --browser" so it 
> doesn't try to take over your desktop with all its Gnomey stuff.
>
> Connecting to various services
> ------------------------------
>
> Now, tell it "go to location." That's Go->Location in the menus, or 
> "Control-L." It will ask for an address, and here are some of the ones 
> I  know and use on the SB campus.
>
> (In these addresses, you must replace <ip> with an IP Address or 
> <netid> with your SB netid. Figuring those out is left as an exercise 
> left for the reader.)
>
> SB Drive (="My Documents" on all the SINC site machines):
> smb://SUNYSB.EDU;<netid>@MyFiles.campus.stonybrook.edu/~<netid>
>
> Sparky: (where us old timers kept our files before SB Drive)
> First, find out your home directory. ssh to sparky and type 'pwd'. 
> That will give you something like "/export/home2/b/l/blah" Stick that 
> in <home> below:
> ssh://<netid>@sparky.ic.sunysb.edu/<home>
>
> UG lab: (computer science majors)
> For this one, do the same trick as on sparky to determine the location 
> of your home directory. It probably looks something like "/home/g/blah"
> Also, the username for the ug lab isn't necessarily the same as your 
> NetID. So call that <uglabid>.
> ssh://<uglabid>@ug.cs.sunysb.edu/<home>
>
> Your other computer in your dorm room, running linux and ssh:
> First, find out its IP address, <ip>. If your username over there is 
> different, use <user>. (If you've connected to it before with ssh you 
> already know how to do this.)
> ssh://<user>@<ip>/
>
> If you have a machine off-campus that you ssh to, a web server or a 
> computer at home on a broadband connection, you can use nautilus to 
> access that, too. Assuming you already can access it via ssh.
>
> Bookmark it!
> ------------
>
> Those long URLs are pretty annoying, and that's where another nice 
> feature of nautilus comes in: You can bookmark a place once you're 
> there, then it sits there in your sidebar. Makes getting around campus 
> remotely really easy, and reduces your time in those crowded SINC sites.
>
> Other applications
> ------------------
>
> The thing that enables this is called "Gnome VFS." Any of the apps on 
> your linux machine that know how to use Gnome VFS can treat an SSH or 
> an SMB connection as a filesystem with nothing special going on with 
> root or kernel modules or mounting.
>
> This means that you can, in theory, without much effort, use Totem on 
> your not-much-disk-space linux laptop on a wireless connection on 
> campus somewhere to listen to music streaming over a secure connection 
> to the monstrous Linux box in your dorm room.
>
> I don't know of very many other operating systems that can do that 
> out-of-the-box ;)
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