I can SSH into a remote host but get "Connection reset by peer" with SSHFS, what do I miss?

In my case (I tried to connect to remote synology as well!) the problem was that SFTP was not enabled on server side. The symptoms were the same: I could ssh to server without any problems, but sshfs command failed.

To enable SFTP on Synology server go to Control Panel -> File Services -> FTP tab -> SFTP section.


I've had issues in the past where sshfs was acting weird. First thing you really should do after installing sshfs is restart your machine, or at least X, once you've added yourself to the fuse group.

This error is typically seen when a user is not in the fuse group, or if allow_other in fuse is not enabled.

There have been times where my ssh key was causing issues. I've had to explicitly tell sshfs what key file to use, even when ssh was configured for it (~/.ssh/config).

  • sshfs -oIdentityFile=/full/path/to/id_rsa user@machine

Another solution is to use your /etc/fstab and add a new entry here:

sshfs#USER@MACHINE:/remote/path/ /mnt/local/path/      fuse    user,_netdev,auto_cache,reconnect,uid=1000,gid=1000,IdentityFile=/full/path/to/.ssh/id_rsa,idmap=user,allow_other    0       2

This tells your machine to mount /remote/path to /mnt/local/path. It's saying that this mount will be a fuse filesystem. There are a few other settings that allow things such as mounting when networking becomes available, automatically re-connecting if there is a disconnect, etc.

The idmap and allow_other portion allow users within the fuse group to mount the filesystem. It will also help map the permissions to match up to the user and group also specified.

In this example, you could then run the following to get the filesytem mounted:

  • mount /mnt/local/path/
  • ls /mnt/local/path/