intertwingly

Alf Eaton: Automatically mounting a remote directory in Ubuntu using autofs + sshfs

Not sure how I missed knowing about autofs before.  Using fstab is problematic for drives on machines that may not be awake at the moment.  Using sshfs would be great for casual use, but as it doesn’t persist across sessions it generally is easier to simply either rsync from or ssh into the machine desired.  This solves both problems.

Step 6 (test that root can log into the remote host) is important if only to add the target host to the root’s known_hosts list.