Graphically browse your remote server filesystem

Hi everybody,
welcome back from the summer vacations, I wish you had good time, as I did

Now it’s time to dust off our keyboard and get back tuning our box!
In order to alleviate the stress of returning, today I’ll show you just a pretty simple, but very useful, tip: manage your remote server filesystem (which offers an ssh connection) in a graphical way within Nautilus, the GNOME’s default filesystem.

Introduction

To dig into the topic, the problem is this: I manage several computers/servers remotely with ssh and very often I need to copy files to/from such systems.

No problem: I can easily use scp to do this!

Yes, I can but … even if I am an enthusiast of the command line tools, these days I found myself a little bit more lazy than usual so I spent some time to do that graphically (a la WinSCP).

Googling a little bit return a nice solution: you can use Nautilus file-manager to do exactly this, without install any other filesystem sharing tool (SAMBA, NFS, etc)!

Create the connection

In order to create the remote share open Nautilus and create a new remote connection with File->Connect to Server …

Nautilus

Select SSH as ‘Service Type’ and insert the remote server address.
You can optionally specify a different:

• Port (22)
• Folder (/)
• user name
• Label

to access the system and a label for the connection.

Here is for example a simple connection to localhost:

Connection Settings

Connect!

Once you click connect you will be prompted to insert the user password:

Authentication

After successful authentication we end-up with a remote drive mounted in Nautilus: you can now copy file/directory to/from the remote filesystem: isn’t that nice?

Computer view

To terminate the connection right click on the drive icon and select Unmount Volume.

Note that the remote connection is persistent: you will find it mounted on the following reboots until you explicitly unmounted.

Enjoy!!!

About these ads