Expandrive
by Tom Temple
Mar 5, 10:33 AM
Expandrive just came out and Jon had a hand in it. It lets you mount ssh servers are local drives. It’s neat, you should try it. It’s $29 to keep—soon to be $39 no doubt. But when Cheetah comes out, Apple should have bought it and it will be included. Apple needs this. “Connect to server” works like shit.
First what it isn’t.
- Expandrive is not rsync. It doesn’t do automatic backups and it doesn’t do incremental up/downloads. Talking to Jon, they might try to integrate with rsync in the future though.
- Expandrive is not subversion, it doesn’t give you version control or deal with multiple access.
- Expandrive is not ssh. You don’t run programs with it.
At first I was like “I’m happy with my solutions right now.” I’ve got a sweet network drive that mounts on all my machines and I use that. But I still end up having to deal with files on other machines (and not the network drive).
Let’s say I want to edit a file on another computer. The old way: ssh and vi. The Expandrive way: open it in my already-running local Emacs. The sweetness of that will become apeareant if you imagine copying some patch code from a forum, for instance. On the local machine, Firefox and Emacs share a clipboard.
The best part: tab completion. My biggest gripe about moving files between computers is that you either need to know the path exactly or you need to use a GUI. Expandrive fixes that since I can tab around the remote filesystem just like the local one. With Expandrive, I promise you I will never use scp again.
I’ve got my Windows laptop (The Technodrome) mounted right here on General Traag. I’ve also got Ares and Cutey Computey mounted here too. That’s nice. I didn’t have that before. I can proofread Courtney’s cover letter without resorting to email or a USB drive. (Admittedly, it did require setting her up with Cygwin though.)
This also greatly simplifies setting up a network drive. Previously it requires Samba or some kind of local “workgroup”. Now you just need an ssh server. Here’s what everyone should do. Take your old desktop from college, put Linux on it and then use Expandrive to make it a network drive. If you can’t handle that, just download an ssh server for Windows. While you’re at it, buy a domain so you can use sweet names like
- cougarbait.levihensel.com,
- zr1xl.braytonosgood.com,
- gluttony.cosmocatalano3.com,
- indolence.jonshea.com,
- tigger.joranelias.com, etc.
- valinor.scottmeek.com (with firewall pelori.scottmeek.com)
These same people make something similar for Windows called sftp drive which I’m hoping somebody gives me for my birthday.
Mar 5, 11:52 AM
My computer names are intagenible nouns that end in -ity. So something like “otiosity” or “torpidity” perhaps.
Mar 6, 03:15 PM
Yeah, my computer is indeed named Palantir
Mar 7, 03:18 PM
How is exandrive different than mounting the server using sshfs?
Mar 8, 12:10 PM
Good question; they pretty much do the same thing. You reminded me that I have MacFUSE, so I played with them both for a little bit. With sshfs from the command line, I could get things mounted and I could set to mount/unmount on sleep. It provided the functionality but not without hastles. One thing it could not handle though was changing subnets. If I walked down my hall with sshfs I got a broken mount point. It seems that connection persistence is a real problem. In my dorm, the wireless router farts a couple times per day for long enough to break the mount point.
Then I downloaded MacFusion. That is a truer comparison and Expandrive won much harder. MacFusion came across as buggy and frustrating. In preferences there’s an “advanced options” field that theoretically should let you do what you want, but I couldn’t make it happen. Instead of just mounting in /Volumes/ and showing in finder, MacFusion put the mountpoint god-knows-where (supposedly ~\Desktop\ but it wasn’t) and the only way to find it was using their GUI.
My conclusion: The cheap grad-student can probably make it work with sshfs, but if you can afford ExpanDrive it’s definitely a better product.
Anything to add, Jon?
Mar 22, 10:19 AM
Based on the sweetness of Expandrive, I’m pulling my recommendation for the MGB Raid Pro. It’s sweet but it doesn’t have ssh. Using SMB with Finder is a lot like sshfs, functional but frustrating. I think I’m going to pull the drives and put them back into the Technodrome. I’ll just put it in the back of a cupboard so I don’t hear the fans.
Apr 2, 07:55 PM
aaahhh…but cougar bait no more, i’m afraid. you should facebook a bit more tom. it is vapid and makes me feel a little less intelligent each time i use it (no offense to addicts like cosmo), but it is nice for keeping track of people and their significant others / status. i don’t know if they have one for “co-mingled” or not though…scott?