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I'm trying to work remotely on a project that I have stored in a server, but the computer I am on belongs to the university and I don't have any keys nor permission to install anything.

Could it be possible to log into my account using eclipse, gedit or something similar? Or to create somehow because I'm using a guest account a local folder connected to the remote? I have been able to connect using firefox, but it doesn't allow to work remotely.

Update:

The host is active24.com (owned by Mamut I think), it is a simple webhosting with ftp and mysql. It's running over linux. I'm the owner, but I don't administer the server, only the domain and db.

I'm locally in a ubuntu machine. I need the FTP acces for editing the web files, because the website is not yet ready and I want to modify it, so I want to either create a remote folder (which I don't think is possible) or to log in remotely to the files. I thougt eclipse would allow me but it requires installing the Remote System Explorer. I have also tried login with ssh but the host doesn't allow me.

Héctor E
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  • You can configure it as SFTP which uses the same port as SSH, this will allow you to SSH into the guest account.. – ryekayo May 27 '15 at 13:42
  • @ryekayo It doesn't seem possible. My hosting doesn't support that option – Héctor E May 27 '15 at 13:53
  • Hmm thats the only thing i can think of, sorry – ryekayo May 27 '15 at 13:53
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    Can you tell us more about the hosting provider? Company name, type of server you use, OS on the server, standard software available on server? – Mark Plotnick May 27 '15 at 13:56
  • Do you only have ftp access to the remote server? Who administers it? You say you have no root access on your local computer, but do you on the remote? What operating systems are the two machines running? What kind of access do you need? Command line? Graphical? Read only? Please [edit] your question and clarify. – terdon May 27 '15 at 14:08

2 Answers2

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Normally one uses the ftp program from the command line. If that is unavailable, the curl suite is almost always installed can be used to fetch as well as other ftp operations via the -Q option (see the man page on this). If vim or emacs is available, both have plugins that will do what you need.

Otheus
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You will need an FTP client, one way or another.

Since this is Ubuntu, the Gnome desktop environment is probably available. It includes an FTP client which allows all Gnome applications to access files over FTP. Open Nautilus (the file manager), select “Connect to Server” in the menu, and enter the ftp:// URL (recent versions of Nautilus) or the server name, user name and path (older versions of Nautilus). You can then use Nautilus to manage files on the FTP server and edit them in GEdit.

If the gvfs-mount package is installed and your account is authorized to use FUSE (I don't remember whether this is the case by default on Ubuntu, and anyway the administrators may have changed it), then you can run gvfs-mount ftp://… to mount an FTP server to a directory. The mount point is either in ~/.gvfs (older versions) or /run/user/$UID/gvfs (newer versions). To see whether you can use FUSE, check if you can access /dev/fuse: if the permissions are crw-rw-rw-, or if they're crw-rw---- and you're in the group that owns the file (check your groups with id), then you can use FUSE.

If you can use FUSE, you can directly mount an FTP directory without going via Gnome's support with Curlftpfs. It's available as an Ubuntu package.

Emacs can open files via FTP natively. Type /ftp:USER@HOSTNAME:/path/to/file as the file name to open.

Even if you don't have administrator privileges, you can install programs to your account. Start with How to install program locally without sudo privileges? and the linked questions if you need help.

Note that editing the files of a website is a bad idea: a mistake could break everything. You should put the files under revision control and make the web server check out a copy.

Community
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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