sshfs and autofs

[Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de>]

If you google for sshfs and autofs you'll find many howtos telling you
to create a private key without passwords because this works.
Most of of those Howtos tell you as well that you should not be doing
this for security reasons..

I've found another solution:
It tries connecting to each running ssh-agent. The first being able to
connect to the ssh location will be used. This way you can keep using
passwords and still use autofs.

  #!/bin/sh -e
  # PATH must contains openssh, sed, sshfs lsof and pgrep
  pids=`pgrep ssh-agent`
  if [ -z "$pids" ]; then
    # no ssh-agent found. Maybe there is a key without password ? You should not be using this!
    sshfs -o ssh_command="ssh -o NumberOfPasswordPrompts=0" "$@"
  else
  for p in $pids; do
    export SSH_AGENT_PID=$p
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(lsof -p $p -a -U  -Fn | sed -n 's/^n//p')
    echo "trying to connect using ssh-agent $p $SSH_AUTH_SOCK" 1>&2
      sshfs -o ssh_command="ssh -o NumberOfPasswordPrompts=0" "$@" && exit 0 || true
  done
  exit 1
  fi

Of course it is just a dirty script. However it does a much better job
than using no password.

Do you host such examples somewhere as well?

Marc Weber