You can access a remote file system securely using sshfs and fuse which is a command to mount a remote filesystem encrypted through ssh.

This way you will be able to access remote files as if they were on you machine, just remember that if the connection between the computers is slow, the access will also be pretty slow.

Package needed

sshfs
fuse-utils

Installation

Get the packages

• For Debian: apt-get install fuse-utils sshfs
• For Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install fuse-utils sshfs
• For Fedora and Centos: yum install fuse-utils sshfs
• For Mandriva: urpmi: urpmi fuse-utils sshfs

Next step is to mount the fuse module

modprobe fuse

Next create the mount point

mkdir /mnt/remote-fs
chown [your-user]:[your-group] /mnt/remote-fs/

Add yourself to the fuse group

adduser [your-user] fuse

Untill here all the command should be issued as root, now switch to your users and mount the remote filesystem.

sshfs remote-user@remote.server:/remote/directory /mnt/remote-fs/

It will now ask you accept the key if this is the first time you connect to that PC using ssh, and then the password, or only the password if this is not the first time you use ssh to connect to the remote.server

that should be all.