Mounting phone contents on my computer.

[TheCrusher]

Hi,

I want to mount the data that's on my phone onto my Mac, so I can "do stuff" on the Mac. I want it to be REALLY mounted, i.e. I want it to show up in /Volumes, and I want the mount command to list it as a mounted volume. What I really want to do is to go into a terminal window and cd to the directory and use all the standard *nix tools I know like ls, and grep, and find, etc. to look around and make changes.

I have Android File Transfer, which functions minimally, but it doesn't atually mount the file system, it just translates MTP at the application level (as far as I can tell).

I'm aware of Kies Air, and AidDroid and others, and while spiffy, they also don't actually mount a filesystem on the computer as far as I can tell. Moreover such tools might be fine at home, but they're problematic in a setting where I'm a real (not wireless) network. And while a wifi network is available, it is separate and secure from my wired network.

I'm also aware that I can open up the phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) and pop out the microSD card and pop it into my computer, but this is a very very long way from seamless access, and it only gets me some of the files on my phone.

I've tried Samba Server by Ice Cold Apps and can't quite get it to work, even on the wifi network at work. I suspect that I'm getting separate networks (channels) on wifi router from the phone versus the laptop I have on my desk, and so they can't see each other directly. (Even if I get this to work, I'm concerned that this software did not ask me to set any kind of password on the volumes.)

My next step is to try to use Samba Server together with ssh tunneling to make sure I have direct access to the phone. That's a problem too because our security only allows ssh via DMZ machines, so I'll have to set up proxied or double-tunnelled access, which is a pain. So before I go through the complicated process of trying to set that up, I'll get to my actual question:

Is there any easy way to do what I'm asking besides the choices that I'm looking at? A real mounted filesystem of my phone's contents?

(Let me say now that my phone is not rooted and is not going to be rooted. I have root access on all of the systems where I want to mount the phone, and have the knowhow to work with non-standard ports.)

tom

P.S. this is effing ridiculous that Google doesn't provide some easy way to do this. And I've read their justification for switching over to MTP, and frankly I find their explanations to be a bit thin.

 

[TheCrusher]

A little progress.

OK. I have gotten Samba Server to work, with ssh tunneling, using connectbot. This is seven kinds of ugly.

Because of our security environment, I first ssh to our DMZ ssh server, and set up a tunnel for ssh straight through to my work system (which we'll call "mine").

Then I run another ssh connection through that tunnel, and I have this new connection tunnel the samba connection, as a reverse tunnel such that connections to mine:7777 get forwarded to localhost:7777 on my phone (which is where the samba server is listening).

Unfortunately OS X is too smart for it's own good. I can't just "open smb://localhost:7777" because the mac says that since it's local, I should just use the files locally and refuses to mount it. So I log into another system at work and then ssh back, creating a tunnel from other:7777 to mine:7777, with the gatewayports option on so that I can access this tunnel from mine.

open smb://other:7777 works. I can log in. I select Guest access (no password) and it all works.

Of course this is a nightmare to set up each time as you can see. And there's also security problems. Even though I'm using ssh tunneling, OS X's refusal to allow me to open samba connections to localhost means that I have to expose this (non-password protected) samba server to everyone on my network.

But of course, worse than tat, Samba Server has no option for limiting access. So I can only assume that anyone who can find my phone on the network and make a samba request to port 7777 can mount my phone wherever they are. I can't even see any signs that my phone is willing to log this anywhere.

So it functions, while being an entirely unacceptable solution.

There are a couple of possible workarounds to the OS X localhost mounting problem. And I could actually live with the awful Connectbot double tunneling setup. But I can't really accept a situation where Samba Server provides absolutely no security.

I'm going to look into OSXFuse and sshfs for android. I don't know if OSXFuse provides real kernel-level mounting. And I don't know if there's an sshfs server for android. But that's the only other feasible solution that I see. If it can work, it would be both much simpler and more secure.

tom

 

[MR.bean]

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