Mounting Options

What are my options for mounting Dreamhost as a local drive? My requirements (in order of importance):

- Mount via Mac OS X 10.4.4
- Encrypted password transmission (ie: no FTP, is WebDAV secure?)
- Access to entire document root with CGI's (ie: no WebDAV)
- Still able to access files via SSH (ie: no WebDAV)

AFP (which is cleartext passwords) doesn't seem to be working on my server (price.dreamhost.com), as i keep getting the error:

"Unknown user, incorrect password, or login is disabled. Please retype the name and password or contact the server's administrator."

SFTP seems a good bet, but there's no way to mount these in OSX.. and i think there's a lot of overhead with SFTP..

ideas?? any interesting SSH Tunnelling ideas?

No way to connect via SFTP with OS X? There are a lot of FTP apps which support SFTP and run on OS X. Sounds like that would be your best bet.

How are you trying to connect via AFP? It doesn't fit your second requirement, but it should work.

You are correct, there are plenty of FTP/SFTP apps for OS X.. none of them allow you to mount as a disk though that can be browsed via the Finder or used by non-SFTP enabled apps.

For AFP, i have tried (via Finder's "Connect to Server"):

afp://mydomain:password@mydomain.com
afp://mydomain@mydomain.com/mydomain
afp://mydomain@mydomain.com/home/mydomain
afp://mydomain@mydomain.com//home/.irish/mydomain
--- (not sure what the .irish is, but it shows up in my path in a standard SFTP client, so i figured i'd try it)

with all those, Finder says its connecting to the file server "peon1083.", and after trying both my SSH password and FTP password, get:

"Unknown user, incorrect password, or login is disabled. Please retype the name and password or contact the server's administrator."

i have also tried those URI's on my local command line:

mount_afp -i afp://mydomain@mydomain.com/mydomain /Volumes/mydomain
(yes, i've created /Volumes/mydomain )

at the command line, i get:
mount_afp: the mount flags are 0000 the altflags are 0020
mount_afp: AFPMountURL returned error -5023, errno is -5023

this seems like a password issue as described:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-tools/commandref/choose.html

I can succesfully login to both SSH and FTP fine, so my password is good (unless AFP has its own password that needs set somewhere).

this may all be a moot point due to the cleartext password, but i want to see what my options are.

In reply to:

---

none of them allow you to mount as a disk though that can be browsed via the Finder or used by non-SFTP enabled apps.

---

I use Interarchy for that. It's as close to "mounting" via (S)FTP as it gets.

As for AFP, try just afp://yourdomain.com (I just verified that works for me.)

>> I use Interarchy for that. It's as close to "mounting" via (S)FTP as it gets.

yeah, i tried that earlier.. this is some goofy "mirroring", not a true mount.. so it seems to be trying to copy everything down upfront... this is definately not scaleable. may as well use rsync..

>> As for AFP, try just afp://yourdomain.com (I just verified that works for me.)

oops.. forgot to list that one in the thousands of combos i tried... same error...

is it possible with all the combos i tried that i locked myself out somehow? (SSH and FTP stilll login fine)

thanks for the ideas!

>not a true mount
You're not gonna get a "true mount" with FTP.

>so it seems to be trying to copy everything down upfront
Some FTP apps will let you "work off the server." For example, if I select a text file in Interarchy, and hit command+j, it handles the downloading & uploading automatically.

>is it possible with all the combos i tried that i locked myself out somehow?
Doubt it. I get that error when I type in the wrong password. Sometime many years ago I think I ran into an issue with this. IIRC, my password had characters which the login system didn't like.

I just tried AFP, and afp://mydomain.com/ worked. (This was on 10.3.9.) The Finder will prompt for username/password and subdirectory. I uses the same username/password that I use for ssh.

You could make an ssh tunnel for AFP, which runs on port 548, and that would minimize the password exposure. You can set up the tunnel in a Terminal window, but for regular use it's nicer to use something like SSHKeychain or AlmostVPN.

> I just tried AFP, and afp://mydomain.com/ worked. (This was on
> 10.3.9.) The Finder will prompt for username/password and
> subdirectory. I uses the same username/password that I use for
> ssh.

crap, it must be something busted in my server then (price.dreamhost.com).. or less likely OS X 10.4.4..

> You could make an ssh tunnel for AFP, which runs on port 548,
> and that would minimize the password exposure. You can set up
> the tunnel in a Terminal window, but for regular use it's nicer to
> use something like SSHKeychain or AlmostVPN.

AlmostVPN is great, and i was gonna set that up next if the only thing close to my requirements was AFP..

Customer Support response from Brian:

>Hello,
>
>Unfortunately, we don't support afp on our servers. Sorry about
> that.
>
>If you need anything else, please let us know.
>
> Thanks!
> Brian

well, that is frustrating.. they really shouldn't have AFP running if they can't support it working across the board.

yeah, not advertised and not supported. The only reason I didn't get irritated with the removal of SMB was that AFP worked.