Installing MacFUSE.

This morning I decided to install MacFUSE. I’d heard about FUSE before, but only with Linux. I never mount remote filesystem Linux system I just ssh, or scp what I need. With my Mac however I am always connected to remote filesystems. When MacFUSE was announced I was quite excited. There are multiple boxes that I only have ssh access to, that I maintain various files on. The ability to treat my home directory on those servers as remote filesystems is very appealing.

There are binaries available but I wanted to do an install right from the subversion repository, knowing as MacFUSE spread updates would be made. Luckily Jay Savage at downloadsquad put together comprehensive instructions.

The instructions were excellent, and the install process went very smoothly. That is until I tried to mount a remote connection. I immediately received this error message:

kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/fusefs.kext is not authentic (check ownership and permissions)

It took me a bit to backtrack through the instructions, and check my work. I finally noticed the permissions on the fusefs.kext directory:

drwxrwxr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jan 19 08:27 fusefs.kext

I had previously set the umask for my user to 002 (the default is 022), to allow group access to different files I create on remote servers, and during the install process this umask was used when creating the fusefs.kext directory. OS X didn’t like group write access to a kernel extension. A simple sudo chmod g-w fusefs.kext and all was fixed.