Local drives, network drives, and ssh / file clients for servers

August 1, 2024

Drives:

• local drives
  • storage devices (HDD / SSD / USB) physically connected to a computer
• network drives
  • storage devices not physcially connected to a computer but accessed over a network
  • usually part of a network-attached storage (NAS) system or a dedicated file server
• shared drives
  • local drives or network drives that are shared across a network to allow multiple users to access them

Clients for SSH / SFTP / FTP:

• WinSCP (file transfer)
  • https://winscp.net/eng/download.php
  • https://github.com/winscp/winscp
• Putty (ssh)
  • https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Mapping network drives (on Linux):

• NFS
  • https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/network-file-system-nfs
• FUSE
  • https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse (FUSE)
    • an interface for userspace programs to export a filesystem to the Linux kernel
• SSHFS
  • https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
  • network filesystem client to connect to SSH servers

Mapping network drives (on Windows):

• Samba
  • https://www.samba.org/
  • https://github.com/samba-team/samba
• SSHFS-WIN (Windows File System Proxy)
  • https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win
    • https://cygwin.com/ (for POSIX environment)
    • https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp (for FUSE)
  • the README example maps a network drive from a Macbook

Tools on Windows:

• check which shared drives exist:
  • Computer Management > System Tools > Shared Folders > Shares