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If you read our earlier article about setting up MacFUSE and sshfs, you may have noted that it’s not exactly intuitive to save your settings, for easy and fast subsequent logins. Also, if for some reason you need to make multiple connections to the same server (for example, to simultaneously be connected under more than one account), that might entail some head-scratching.

Fortunately there are ways to make the connection process easier. In this article we will focus on a program called Secure Remote Disk, which provides a simple GUI for connecting to remote systems. It can be freely downloaded, but the author does ask for donations. You still have to install MacFUSE and (we think) sshfs (but feel free to try it with only MacFUSE installed, if you haven’t yet installed sshfs). You won’t need to use the sshfs application to make your connections. And, as with sshfs, once you have established the connections you can close Secure Remote Disk and the connections will remain in place.

To begin with, download and install Secure Remote Disk in the usual manner. Open the application and you’ll be greeted with a screen similar to this:

You will see there is already an example connection. “Name” is the name you wish to assign to the connection; it’s not used outside of Secure Remote Disk as far as we can see. We have actually modified the example slightly (as shown above) in order to make a couple of points. First, if you want the server name capitalized, do it for every mention of the server in this panel - otherwise it will appear in lowercase in Finder, which might look a bit strange if you drag the pseudo-drive into Finder’s left-hand sidebar menu (once again, it goes under the devices, not the shared locations), to make it accessible in all Finder windows.

The other, possibly more important point is that you must specify a directory in the lower text entry box - this is a directory on your Mac (not on the remote server), located off of your user directory (which is why it starts with ~/) that will become the link to the pseudo-drive. If you clear this field, you may find that Secure Remote Disk simply hangs, and if you then close and and attempt to re-open it, it crashes on startup. The only way to restore operation is to delete the preferences file for the program (which is found at
~/Library/Preferences/de.prima.jan.SecureRemoteDisk.plist) and start over from scratch. Also, and this is a major difference from the sshfs application, the specified directory cannot be in /Volumes (which is where sshfs normally puts it) - it must be off of your user directory (if you try to put it in /Volumes, it will put it in your user directory anyway!). For most users this will not make any difference, with the caveat that the directory name should not match any existing directory name that you already have, unless that directory was created by Secure Remote Disk (or you) expressly for this purpose. The directory will look like a normal directory when not connected to the server, but you should resist any urge to use it as a normal directory (for storing files, etc.).

Also note that there an Advanced tab:

Here you can change the port number for the connection (if the server uses a different port), optionally specify a directory on the remote server (not to be confused with the directory on your Mac that we talked about above), and if you are using a public key rather than a password for access, be sure to check the box shown here.

We didn’t try using password access, but assume that when you attempt to make a connection that requires a password, the program will prompt you for it.

There was one thing about this software that we didn’t like, and we don’t know if it’s a problem with Secure Remote Disk or MacFUSE, or maybe even Finder. We tried making multiple connections to the same server using different user accounts. Although we (obviously) used a different connection name and directory for each connection, when we attempted to drag the connections into Finder’s left-hand sidebar menu, they copied properly but the names shown were that of the server, not the connection name or the directory name. In other words, if you had two connections to Example.com, and dragged them both into the left menu bar in Finder, both would be labeled “Example.com” and the only way to determine which was which would be to open each one and see what’s inside. It would be much better if each were labeled with the connection name, but we don’t know if that’s anything that the author of Secure Remote Disk would be able to do. We think that most users would likely want to have these connections in the Finder sidebar, both for easy access and because doing so provides an eject button next to each connection, which can be used to disable the connection if so desired.

The other thing we wish that Secure Remote Disk offered is the ability to automatically establish some or all connections at startup. As it is now, you have to start it up, click on each connection, then click on the “Connect” button. That’s certainly easier than using sshfs, but it would be nice if there were a checkbox associated with each connection, that if checked would just go ahead and establish the connection whenever Secure Remote Disk is started. Then you could add Secure Remote Disk to the list of programs automatically started at login, and your connections would be established automatically.

The thing that Secure Remote Disk provides is the ability to (relatively) easily make desired connections to your server(s). If you observe the caveat about not trying to leave the Directory field blank on the first screen (the field that specifies the local directory on your Mac), it seems to work very well.

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