Is there a remote filesystem for Linux that's encrypted and resilient against unreliable servers?

user137063

1/4/24, 4:01 PM

I've tried many combinations of sshfs and SMB, with autofs and/or manual mounts in a Cron job, and I've always had freezing / long timeout issues when servers become unavailable or weren't available to begin with.

My requirements are as follows:

Have an actual, proper mount point in the local filesystem (i.e., not something like KIO) that is compatible with any application
automatically mount the remote filesystem whenever the server is / becomes available
instead of processes freezing when trying to access a mountpoint whose server has disappeared, I'd want a quick timeout (say, 3 seconds) after which an I/O error is returned, so system stability isn't compromised
reasonably good encryption, as this is supposed to be over the internet

i.e., just a "reasonable remote filesystem", like any remote filesystem should behave really!

Any recommendations?

1 + 1

networking

filesystems

distributed-filesystems

network-filesystem

Nikita Kipriyanov

1/5/24, 10:47 AM

This looks like software or a product recommendation for me (which is off topic). The client connection reliability is covered in the answer below; for solving file server reliability problems use clusters. There are pretty big collection of manuals of how to do this using e.g. Pacemaker. Also please take a look at GlusterFS and CEPH FS which are designed to be resilient against backend server failures.

Score:1

Server

Tero Kilkanen

1/5/24, 9:45 AM

Remote connection encryption and shared filesystem are two different things and there is no point to make mix them.

Set up a Wireguard tunnel between your client and server, and run any remote filesystem on top of that.

Look closely into the mount options of your operating system on the client side so that you can tune the behavior when server is not reachable.

+ 0

Elon Musk

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