My new Mac Mini doesn’t have an optical drive. It’s a bit of a pain, but I definitely think it is the way forward. Soon, everything will be cloud-based and accessible over the Internet. But I still have old DVDs. What to do? Apple has something called Remote Disc. It allows other computers to share their optical drive over the network. I’ve tried it and works painlessly. Unfortunately, Remote Disc does not support Linux. What’s a Ubuntu lover to do? Go hacking with sshfs, of course.

SSHFS allows you to mount a filesystem over SSH. On my Ubuntu laptop, I installed openssh-server:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

On the Mac, I installed Fuse for OS X and MacFusion. Be sure to install the MacFUSE compatibility layer. Otherwise, MacFusion will complain that the session was unexpectedly terminated. MacFusion includes ftpfs and sshfs. The sshfs binary can be added to the PATH using a symlink:

sudo ln -s /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/MacOS/sshfs /usr/local/bin/sshfs

To mount the filesystem, I used MacFusion’s simple UI.

Or in Terminal:

mkdir /media/cdromdrive
sshfs samuel@192.168.1.171:/media/mountdir /media/cdromdrive

where 192.168.1.171 is the IP address of my Ubuntu box, /media/mountdir is the location of the CD’s mount point, and /media/cdromdrive is where it will be mounted on the Mac.