I have a server that only has FTP/SFTP/TLS support for accessing the files on it, which, in general, should be mostly sufficient. Now I’m using Mac OS X and Transmit/Yummy FTP for most of my tasks.

Since I’m a person who loves to have everything integrated into the standard GUI as good as possible I’ve been trying to find a solution for mounting directories/shares of that server straight into the finder, like you do with the iDisk or any other NFS/SMB/AFP share.

Unfortunately, the Finder itself only has read only FTP support (now I also know that FTP wasn’t made as a protocol for doing these kinds of things in the first place), which doesn’t get me too far actually, since every time I would want to upload/change a file I would need to start Transmit (or any other FTP client) and use the clunky non-embedded interface to manage the files, which is, for me at least, nowhere near satisfactory.

Sadly, after endless amounts of investigation and searching on google, I didn’t find a solution that works apart from “Use Transmit, it’s as close as you will get!”. I have tried everything that came onto my mind so far, even some very weird, exotic and just plain scary SSH tunnel workarounds, luck seems to avoid me though.

I found Google’s MacFUSE do to the job prettily, using a SSH filesystem (almost) works like a charm.

Download it and install, preferably compile it from the source, which is described in the Google Code HOWTO: code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/HOWTO

With the help of this you can basically mount SSH accounts as virtual volumes - and with the right parameters it even works in the Finder:

sshfs USERNAME@HOST:/DIR /MOUNTPOINT -oping_diskarb,volname=NAMEOFMOUNT ;

“USERNAME” being your SSH username;
“HOST” the SSH host;
“DIR” being the directory you want to mount;
“MOUNTPOINT” - you will need a mountpoint on your local filesystem, this should preferably be an empty directory. I just created empty directories in my home folder for that purpose (e.g. ~/mounts/orange);
“NAMEOFMOUNT” is the name of the volume as it will appear in the finger.

After entering this you should be prompted for the password of the SSH account, now, magically, you should have the volume appear in the Finder. Wee!

Now, the one and only real thing to make sure however is: Be aware that the Finder doesn’t like unstable connections - it will hopelessly beachball once the connection is interrupted unexpectedly for whatever reason.