Convenience script to mount cluster directories on a local machine
The script needs to be edited, replace
server=""
with
server="user@host"
I recommend using "transfer" as the host.
Requires sshfs.
Install osxfuse then install sshfs. Because this involves a kernel extension and can be tricky to debug, I recommend getting the released installer from https://osxfuse.github.io. Download both FUSE and sshfs.
Do a default install of FUSE first, with the preferences pane but without the legacy support. Then you will have to enable the extension by going to the security preferences as prompted.
Next, install the sshfs package. After this, you should have the sshfs command in the terminal.
I highly recommend turning off creation of .DS_Store on mounted volumes with
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE
The sshfs protocol uses sftp to retrieve files on the remote server. Because of the encryption overhead, and because it's actually doing lots of sftp commands under the hood, it's slower than an NFS mount. The default command allows caching, which improves performance but can lead to a delay between saving a file on your local disk and it appearing changed on the server.
I use it for editing code and viewing files with Preview (eg, PDFs), Safari (html prep output) or ITK-SNAP. I/O intensive jobs with many files (such as git operations) are best done server side.
If you need to transfer or QC a lot of data, I recommend copying with rsync.