How do I make sshfs work in Debian? (I get /dev/fuse: Permission denied )

I've moved from Ubuntu to Debian on a machine and all my sshfs mounting scripts fail with

fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied

now. Am I missing something simple?

John Baber-Lucero

Posted 2012-08-25T18:49:32.153

Reputation: 757

Answers

For some reason, Debian configures FUSE to require users to be in the fuse group.

Run gpasswd -a username fuse as root, then log out and log in again. (Important step.)

user1686

Posted 2012-08-25T18:49:32.153

Reputation: 283 655

You don't have to logout/login, just type 'newgrp fuse'. – DmitrySandalov – 2014-09-06T13:58:29.597

@DmitrySandalov: That works, but only for the particular terminal window. – user1686 – 2014-09-06T14:52:53.637

This fails for me with this error: gpasswd: group 'fuse' does not exist in /etc/group – markshep – 2018-01-26T10:06:21.587

7just for record - this did not work for me :-( – gorn – 2013-03-25T16:55:19.873

5I am not an expert but I solved my problem by changing permissions of /dev/fuse - it had a root group and not rw for group (sudo chgrp fuse /dev/fuse; sudo chmod g+w /dev/fuse) – gorn – 2013-03-25T16:58:58.390

I have two Wheezy... one installed from scratch, another which was upgrade from Squeeze and then installed fuse later... and I have different permission on /dev/fuse. A recent bug in fuse package ? – Yves Martin – 2013-06-06T12:40:51.407

Didn't work for me, neither did changing the group and setting permissions on /dev/fuse. – Adambean – 2013-07-31T20:56:17.053

2Can be : usermod -aG fuse <your-username> as root, then log out and log in again – Cedric – 2013-11-17T17:42:36.337

Yeah, that's exactly the same thing, (except gpasswd also has a "remove" option so it's generally more convenient to do group changes with). – user1686 – 2014-02-15T14:45:49.530

There is a bug report indicating that Debian Wheezy (which seems to have the version 2.9.0-2 of the fuse package, the bug is reported fixed in 2.9.0-3) may set wrong permissions for /dev/fuse (crw------T 1 root root in my case).

As stated around the comments of the earlier posts, this can be fixed by running the following commands as root:

chmod g+rw /dev/fuse
chgrp fuse /dev/fuse

Also remember to add your user to the fuse group with, e.g., gpasswd -a username fuse.

oseiskar

Posted 2012-08-25T18:49:32.153

Reputation: 221

Changing permissions ('sudo chmod g+rw /dev/fuse', the above omits the 'r') did work for me (in addition of course to adding my user to the fuse group).

Patrick

Posted 2012-08-25T18:49:32.153

Reputation: 21

I ran into the same /dev/fuse permission denied problem (unrelated the sshfs). In my case the fuse package was not installed. The package provides all the basic necessities like the mount tools, sysfs control, a new "fuse" group, and inode permission (managed by udev).

# apt-get install fuse
# usermod -a -G fuse <username>
# modprobe fuse

Last command loads the kernel module, and the kernel tells udev to set the permissions.

h0tw1r3

Posted 2012-08-25T18:49:32.153

Reputation: 1 408

1usermod -G fuse <username> useradd does not accept the -a parameter – volothamp – 2015-06-09T20:24:53.100

I got the same problem. Turned out the permission for /dev/fuse was the following. I did the chmod command and it works fine. Don't know how it got into this state. It was working yesterday.

$ ls -l /dev/fuse
crw-rw---T 1 root fuse 10, 229 May  4 16:41 /dev/fuse

chmod a+rw /dev/fuse

#now it works fine!

packetie

Posted 2012-08-25T18:49:32.153

Reputation: 111

The reason the fuse group exists is so that administrators can control who can use FUSE to mount filesystems: only those who are in the fuse group (or have root access) can use FUSE. Your solution gives access to all users. – Louis – 2015-04-14T15:05:04.637