Why am I suddenly unable to write to this sshfs volume?

Question

There is a remote server which I connect to daily through ssh. I do a lot of editing of files on the server, so I use sshfs to do so.

I mount the directory with $ sshfs user@host:/var/www/html ~/sshfs/html. This has worked very well over the past few months, and still should work even now. However, I'm having some strangely inconsistent access problems.

Case 1 - Sublime Text: I'm completely unable to save anything using my editor of choice (Sublime Text). I can't Save-As to create a new file in ~/sshfs/html/ either. I can open files, but not save.

Sublime gives the following message in an alert box when trying to save:

Unable to save ~/sshfs/html/foo
Error: rename(/home/ben/sshfs/html/.subl219.tmp, /home/ben/sshfs/html/foo) failed
errno: 1

Case 2 - Kate: I tried opening things in Kate to see if Sublime was just being dumb. I'm still unable to edit existing files, but I can create new files with no problems in Kate.

Kate gives the following message in an alert box when trying to save an edit:

The document could not be saved, as it was not possible to write to /home/ben/sshfs/html/foo.
Check that you have write access to this file or that enough disk space is available.

Case 3 - Vim: Here's where things start making less sense. I tried using Vim on my local machine with

$ vim ~/sshfs/html/foo

Surprisingly, I have no problems at all using Vim. It opens, edits, saves, and creates files without problems. I also have no problems when using shell commands such as touch.

Things to consider

• Group access
  • The group developers has access to all files I want to edit.
  • My local user is a member of the group developers.
  • My remote user (The account I login to via SSH) is a member of the group developers.
  • The group developers exists on both the server and my local machine with the same ID.
• Other things
  • I have several directories across a couple of servers that I use like this. None of the other directories on other servers are giving me any trouble.
• Running $ ls -l on my local host inside the mount point:

Output

drwxrwxr-x 1 root developers  4096 Sep  8 06:47 admin
drwxrwxr-x 1 root developers  4096 Jun  4  2013 agent_submit
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root developers  6605 Jun  4  2013 authorize.php

• Running $ ls -l on the remote host through an ssh shell:

Output

drwxrwxr-x 10 root developers  4096 Sep  8 06:47 admin
drwxrwxr-x  2 root developers  4096 Jun  4  2013 agent_submit
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root developers  6605 Jun  4  2013 authorize.php

Answer 1

sshfs -o workaround=rename user@host:/var/www/html ~/sshfs/html

Sources:

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/13843/gedit-sshfs-wont-save-vi-saves-fine
• https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158098