Sunday, October 5, 2008

Installing CurlFtpFS on Ubuntu Edgy to mount FTP shares

To mount an FTP share under Ubuntu linux there are at least two choiches: LUFS and ftpFS.
After reading this post, I opted for ftpFS, through CurlFtpFS. The most comprehensive tutorial to install it under Ubuntu Edgy I have found is this one.
By purging all comments you get this simple way to install:

  1. become root:
    prompt#: sudo -i

  2. install the necessary libraries:
    prompt#: apt-get install libc6 libcomerr2 libcurl3 libfuse2
    libglib2.0-0 libidn11 libkrb53 libssl0.9.8 zlib1g fuse-utils

  3. download backport package for Edgy from here: curlftpfs-0.9.1-1_edgy.tar.bz2;
  4. unpack with:
    prompt#: mkdir curlftps-edgy
    prompt#: tar xvjf curlftpfs-0.9.1-1_edgy.tar.bz2 -C curlftps-edgy

  5. install .deb package:
    prompt#: dpkg -i curlftpfs_0.9.1-1_i386.deb

  6. clean up:
    prompt#: rm -r curlftps-edgy

  7. let mount recognize the filesystem type:
    prompt#: ln -s /usr/bin/curlftpfs /sbin/mount.curlftpfs 

If you need to mount in fstab, add the proper line to fstab itself:
ftpusername:ftppassword@ftp.site.address /path/to/mountpoint curlftpfs 
rw,allow_other,uid=userid,gid=groupid 0 0