I'd like to use some of the storage on my Linode as backup / shared storage and was wondering what the best option was for this. I run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on all my nodes.

I was originally thinking of just using NFS but that doesn't really offer any protection when mounting file systems across a public network so I was wondering if anyone knew of any other options that would work in this case?

You want sshfs.

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These cases are where VPN/tunneling protocols like L2TP and OpenVPN work nicely. The Linode Library has a fairly illustrative article on the latter.

Your assertion about NFS specifically is not entirely true, however. rfc5403 defines RPCSEC_GSS--secure token exchange for RPC protocols (like NFS). Machine and user service principals are issued by a KDC, which generates tickets that are used to authenticate each. The rpc.gssd(8) manpage also describes the (optional) cryptography mechanisms you can utilize for the transfer of your actual payload.

And once you set up your KDC, ssh/pam-krb5 authentication is actually quite fun, as a bonus.


sshfs, particularly due to being implemented using FUSE hackery, ends up being quite non-performant and not a very fun experience.

I dare say, NFS over VPN wouldn't be a great experience either.

There was a point where FUSE filesystems *did* suck performance wise, but in my experience, things have drastically improved through the last couple years. Honestly, over a high-latency WAN connection, whatever performance issues FUSE has are *not* going to be the performance bottleneck.

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