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Comment by thrillgore | Hacker News Reader

You can do all sorts of things with SSH. My favorite is SSHFS, which is couplings for SFTP that treat it like a proper filesystem, and it works on everything that uses SSH. Quicker to setup than a VPN and SMB, and about as secure (you could also theoretically use PAM to authenticate with LDAP or newer MFA protocols)

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I use SSHFS daily with my NAS on my home network. It's far faster and simpler to administer than SMB or NFS, with way less config overhead and AAA complications than the other two.

Unfortunately, it is currently semi-abandonware: https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs/blob/eadf7f104a479f0313ecd4... It works well enough for me, but there are certain issues to be aware of. For example, listening for file changes via inotify doesn't work-- and it's a double-whammy of neither SFTP nor FUSE supporting that, so it's unlikely to be fixed any time soon.

qemu lets you boot VMs over ssh:

  $ qemu-kvm -hda ssh://example.com/var/tmp/fedora-39.img -m 2048

The magic here is done by https://www.libssh.org// which we also use in https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-ssh-plugin.1.html

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