sshfs does not seem to work in Colab Enterprise notebook

Question

I've been trying to use sshfs to connect a notebook running in Colab Enterprise to my local machine (running an ssh server) and mount a local directory into the remote Runtime. But I get the error fuse: mount failed: Permission denied even before the SSH connection is even attempted.

I'm running as root, connecting to the SSH server as another user (i.e. sshfs someuser@ip ), and my mount point (in the notebook runtime) exists and is owned by root. What could be happening here ?

• gogasca: Does this work in free Colab? would you mind sharing the steps to setup sshfs I can try to reproduce it. digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/… may be a good example?
• gogasca: I was able to reproduce the issue you saw. fuse: mount failed: Permission denied same issue with GCSfuse: {"time":"18/11/2023 11:18:06.744235","severity":"INFO","msg":"Start gcsfuse/1.2.1 (Go version go1.21.3) for app \"\" using mount point: /content/gcs-bucket-mount\n"} daemonize.Run: readFromProcess: sub-process: mountWithArgs: mountWithStorageHandle: Mount: mount: permission denied I think it has to do with the way we start the Colab container in Colab runtime. Will test further and get back to you.
• gogasca: I submitted a fix, will keep you posted when this will be available in production. I think of 1-2 weeks.

Answer 1

I tried GCSfuse and worked fine, please try SSHfs which should work as well.

Example:

!export GCSFUSE_REPO=gcsfuse-`lsb_release -c -s`
# This returns gcsfuse-jammy. Replace manually
!echo "deb https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt gcsfuse-jammy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gcsfuse.list
!curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
!sudo apt-get update
!sudo apt-get install gcsfuse
# Create a local directory. Here you will mount GCSfuse. (GCS bucket is: $BUCKET_NAME)
!mkdir gcs-bucket-mount
!gcsfuse --implicit-dirs $BUCKET_NAME gcs-bucket-mount
{"time":"07/12/2023 12:05:39.597680","severity":"INFO","msg":"Start gcsfuse/1.2.1 (Go version go1.21.3) for app \"\" using mount point: /content/gcs-bucket-mount\n"}

Answer 2

There was an internal feature request to allow Mount of Fuse systems into Colab Runtime, I submitted the fix and will rollout to production next week. (By Friday 1st should be in all regions)