I recently moved my media drive and attached it to my Myth Box instead of to my desktop, because videos played over the wireless were skipping (and we were really into the first season of Sons of Anarchy :) ).
So now, I needed to find a way to mount my music files back onto my desktop that would make them not skip. I finally settled on SSHFS, after numerous latency/disconnect problems with NFS, and an ability to properly configure Samba. SSHFS always worked for me, but I had to mount it all the time. I kept forgetting to do it, and then my Rhythmbox kept showing up with "Missing Files" that had to be re-read once I mounted the drive.
I then discovered the beauty of AUTOFS + SSHFS. This auto-mounts a drive on-demand. Genius! When Rhythmbox goes to ask if the file exists, it mounts it. After 30 seconds if a file isn't used, it dismounts it.
By using key-based authentication to my box downstairs, I can mount and dismount the share transparently. SECURITY NOTE: For my personal, private, two-desktop setup in my own house, this is acceptable to me. In more rigorous security environments, this may not be the best solution.
I followed the tutorial here first:
http://www.tjansson.dk/?p=84
...which worked nearly perfectly, except it kept asking me for my password even though I have key-based authentication working from the command line.
The problem is that autofs runs as root (it's a daemon) so it's looking for the id_rsa key file in /root/.ssh instead of my user's .ssh folder. Simple, per this post (last one) http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56077 -- I copied the id_rsa from my local folder to my root user's .ssh folder, and now I've got transparent, reliable, automatic mounting of my music so I can play it on my desktop upstairs.
