Using the Gnome virtual file system (gvfs) packages allows us to access remote servers from the linux userspace GUI environment via FTP/Obex/SSH/WebDAV/WebDAVS/Samba

1. The gigolo package allows management of the gvfs mounts using a GUI application.  If not installed with your distro, you can install it from the base repositorities using either :

    # sudo apt-get install gigolo     for debian/ubuntu

   or

    # yum -y install gigolo               for red hat/centos/fedora

2. Starting gigolo – Look for the launcher for gigolo under the System (debian) /System Tools (red hat/centos) menu category.  To get started click Connect.[1]
   
3. Choose which protocol you want to use to mount your remote file system [1]. Supported options are FTP/Obex/SSH/WebDAV/WebDAVS/Samba.  For my system, I want to mount my remote Digital Ocean web server, so I select SSH [2], and then enter my SSH username and port [3]. Once I click Connect, my new gvfs bookmark appears in the right pane [4] and double clicking on it opens up the mounted file system in nautilus [5].
   

   [1]

   [2]

   [3]

   [4]

   [5]

4. Great! Now that the file systems are mounted up, you can use the GUI tools to navigate the remote file systems, modify files, etc.  But what if you’re a command line junkie?debian: from the shell,I can cd to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gvfs to get to my mounted remote file systems.

   glaw@fedora:1000$ cd $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gvfs
   glaw@fedora:gvfs$ ls
   sftp:host=web2.XXXXXX,port=XXX,user=root
   glaw@fedora:gvfs$ cd sftp\:host\=web2.XXXXX\,port\=XXXX\,user\=root/
   glaw@fedora:sftp:host=web2.XXXXX,port=XXXX,user=root$ ls -lart
   total 524
   drwx------ 1 glaw glaw  16384 Jul  8  2014 lost+found
   -rw-r--r-- 1 glaw glaw      0 Jul  8  2014 .autorelabel
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Aug 12  2015 srv
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Aug 12  2015 mnt
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Aug 12  2015 media
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Feb 29  2016 usr
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 May 16 11:25 opt
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Jul  5 08:54 lib
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Aug  1 03:38 backup
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Sep 24 23:14 home
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw      0 Sep 25 01:11 proc
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw      0 Sep 25 01:11 sys
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Sep 25 01:11 var
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   2880 Sep 25 01:11 dev
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Sep 25 01:11 .
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Sep 25 01:11 boot
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Oct 24 13:35 etc
   dr-x------ 3 glaw glaw      0 Oct 25 13:15 ..
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw  36864 Oct 26 13:56 lib64
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw  36864 Oct 26 13:56 bin
   dr-xr-x--- 1 glaw glaw   4096 Oct 26 14:00 root
   dr-xr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw  12288 Nov  1 08:41 sbin
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw   4096 Nov  6 20:53 scripts
   drwxr-xr-x 1 glaw glaw    680 Nov  7 00:00 run
   drwxrwxrwx 1 glaw glaw 372736 Nov  7 14:04 tmp

5. Connecting from the command line
   The Linux GUI is nice but it is also to mount this up via the command line.

   debian:  # sudo apt-get install sshfs
   red hat: # yum install sshfs
   # sshfs -p 1234  root@web2.XXXXX.com:/ /path/to/mount
   To enable this at login, you can also add the following to your GUI user's crontab : 
   # crontab -e
   @reboot sshfs -p 1234  root@web2.XXXXX.com:/ /path/to/mount

Ok, that’s great but what are the uses?

As a web developer occasionally I have to try to track down where a certain CSS class definition is or where a PHP function is.  When I haev SSH access, this is no problem, but with FTP only, it makes it much more difficult unless I want to mirror a full website on my local computer.  With a gvfs FTP mount, it makes it easy to cd over to the mount point and then use the handy dandy grep command to find what I am looking for :

# grep -r myCSSClass ./