Mounting Filesystems with SSH Forwarding Across a Gateway

sshfs is wickedly handy for mounting remote directories on your local filesystem. Recently I needed to mount the /logs directory off a remote server so a program on my workstation could process log files in /logs.

The textbook command to do that would be:

[me@workstation]$ sshfs server.remotenet.org:/logs /mnt/svrlogs

The tricky part in this particular case is that the server is on a private network so my workstation can not directly access it. I’m required to first ssh to a gateway machine and then ssh to the server.

----------------               -------------         -------------
|workstation   |               |           |         |  server   |
|              | --------------|  gateway  | ------- |           |
|/mnt/svrlogs  |               |           |         |   /logs   |
----------------               -------------         -------------

I found three ways to work with this scenario. I’d love to hear of more ways and get feedback on these.