Centos – SSHFS on startup CentOS 6.3

I've found the answer myself. The problem was that I didn't use the option allow_other.

sshfs -o allow_other -o kernel_cache -o auto_cache -o reconnect \
  -o compression=no -o cache_timeout=600 -o ServerAliveInterval=15 \
  xxx@yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy:/mnt/content /home/xxx/path_to/content

To use this option you have to set the option user_allow_other in /etc/fuse.conf. When I did this I had another problem. The file /etc/fuse.conf haven't had read permissions for other users on my Ubuntu box. So I've changed that too and now I can access the directory with any user.

Ok, I figured this out. If nothing is specified in pam_mount.conf.xml for how to mount fuse filesystems like sshfs then it is supposed to be configured like this.

<fusemount>mount.fuse %(VOLUME) %(MNTPT) -o %(OPTIONS)</fusemount>

So I didnt explicitly have anything set until I started messing with changing that default to do things like delete any files in the mount point or trick ssh into thinking that home was at a different location so it wold not create the .ssh folder under home. Both of those failed for other reasons. Finally I set things back to defaults and then replaced the mount.fuse executable with a bash script to log all of the arguments and environment variables that its executed with. When I did this I found out the issue. There was no space between the -o and nonempty. So as a result the argument was -ononempty which probably caused the mount to fail or at least the nonempty option to not be applied. Hence the default, if you dont specify anything must be something like this:

<fusemount>mount.fuse %(VOLUME) %(MNTPT) -o%(OPTIONS)</fusemount>

So I finally specified explicitly what the default is supposed to be, see above. And it worked!!! Maybe this was a bug in pam_mount. I am running pam_mount-2.5-1.fc12.x86_64 on Centos6. Hope some one else finds this info useful. Thanks to every one who commented.