Using sftp without mounting it

Question

When I mount sftp/ftp, and connection breaks for a while, the mount "freezes" and will freeze any process that deals with it (the editor, Nautilus, umount, etc). I can't even unmount the folder. (My system is Ubuntu 9.10)

What's the way to edit files on that sftp/ftp folder without mounting it, in order to avoid these freezes?

A more detailed explanation:

I work as a web programmer, and have to edit a lot of files on a commercial web hosting. I sshfs (mount) an sftp folder to /media/project1 and edit files there. Our corporate LAN uses ADSL which disconnects briefly every half an hour (I don't notice that, but my sshfs does). After a disconnect, web borwsers work fine, but /media/project1 is not accessible. Any process that touches /media/project1 after that, becomes Uninterruptible, hence killall, kill -9 PID have no effect for 5-15 minutes.

When this happens, my editor freezes, I can't edit anything, nor can unmount the folder. I could run another instance of the editor, mount the sftp in yet another folder, but this is labor- and memory-intensive.

I'll appreciate any ideas to avoid this.

Answer 1

You can use sshfs with autossh to create a respawning sshfs mountpoint. I haven't done it myself, but I plan to, and howtos are readily available on google search.

Answer 2

You might consider working over an ssh connection, directly editing on the target servers.

Or copying the files locally, and then pushing them back when they've been updated appropriately.

Answer 3

All network drive technologies suffer from the problem you experienced; if you open files on the drive, and the network connection gets cut, any program trying to access the drive will freeze.

A safer method is:

1. Download the files you need to edit via scp/sftp and put them in some local folder.

2. Edit the files locally.

3. Upload the edited files back to the server via scp/sftp.

An alternate method (expanding on something warren mentioned, but this only works if your editing can be done inside a terminal -- no GUIs allowed):

1. ssh to the remote computer.

2. run "screen", to protect your editing against disconnections.

3. edit the files with your preferred editor (vi/m, emacs, nano, whatever), or run commandline tools for multimedia processing.

4. if disconnected, reconnect with ssh and run "screen -D -R" to get back to your previous session.