Most of my work is on the command line, if I need to grab a file from my media server I usually just scp, however today I decided to look into a easier method to mount my media server’s file system locally to my Macbook. If you are used to using Fuse on Linux, this will seem familiar to you, as MacFuse is based upon Fuse.

This can be done with two nice tools, SSHFS and MacFuse.

So first thing you will want to do is grab MacFuse and install it.

I’m currently using Snow Leopard, so I checked out SSHFS binaries with…

svn co http://macfuse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/filesystems/sshfs/binary sshfs-binaries

and grabbed the leopard version and moved it to my /usr/bin

mv sshfs-static-leopard /usr/bin/sshfs

So at this point all the needed tools are setup, so to mount my media share on my server I can perform the following….

mkdir mediashare

sshfs craig@leafserver:/mediaserver/tv/ ./mediashare -oauto_cache,reconnect,volname=mediashare

And now I have access to a my remote filesystem on both the command line and in Finder, with the ability to treat it as any local folder. Very handy I’d say. I plan on using this more often especially to manage some of the web servers I work on.

I just did a fresh install on my Macbook after picking up a new hard drive yesterday and was looking for some ways to minimize my system’s footprint as much as possible. While doing this I stumbled upon an application called Monolingual. Essentially it allows you to remove the loads of unnecessary language resources that are spread throughout your system. It is really quite amazing when you start seeing the amount of foreign languages that are supported by default and would never be used by the average user. I was amazed at how much free space I gained after doing it, almost 2GB!

You can find the application here.