I was looking for this a few months ago. It looks like I just wasn’t looking hard enough (well, searching for the right keywords, at least). LUFS is a “hybrid userspace file system framework” which allows you to mount FTP, SSH, and even Gnutella files (it’s expandable) as local folders.
It involves a kernel mod and a user daemon that handles most of the VFS calls… Too bad there’s no way to handle the stuff purely as a loopback device, that would make it easier to port to OS X, I’d imagine. Obviously it doesn’t work on Windows, though. The only solution I’ve found over the past few months that’ll mount SSH/SSL drives is KnoWare’s Internet Neighborhood Pro.
(Look into KDE Fish – might work xplatform – can it work outside of KIOSlave – ie, at system level, or does it require Konqueror [and a GUI]?)
See also:
- enfs – user level vfs for linux and bsd. last release (v0.1) was in 2001 though
- AVFS – userspace virtual file system that supports: floppies, tar and gzip files, zip, bzip2, ar and rar files, ftp sessions, http, webdav, rsh/rcp, ssh/scp via Coda Kernel mod (OS X doesn’t seem to have one, and from this message, looks like it never will) or shared library hack (works for Solaris – would it work for OS X?)
- podfuk – like AVFS, uses Coda, works for Linux and Solaris