Shfs is totally the awesome thing of the moment. It is a network filesystem that runs over ssh and just works with zero setup on the server side (provided it is running an ssh or rsh server).

The way it works is this. On the client system, you install shfs, which consists of a regular VFS kernel module. Then you can just do "shfsmount foo.bar.edu /mnt/shfs" (where foo.bar.edu is some machine you can ssh into) and the kernel module will establish a ssh connection into foo.bar.edu. Now whenever you do anything in /mnt/shfs (ls for example), shfs will run some shell or perl code on the server machine to satisfy the request, and it will work just as if you were sitting in your home directory on foo.bar.edu.

The idea is so dead simple and yet has such radical results that I wanted to smack myself for not having thought of it. Man, what a cool idea. Performance is not horrible either because it does some caching.