Ssh – Permissions issues with mounting remote server into a specific folder

To transform remote absolute (starting with /) symlinks to be relative to the sshfs mount point, use the follow_symlinks option:

sshfs -o follow_symlinks ...

The transform_symlinks option does nothing for me, see this issue.

I just solved a similar issue. I wanted to mount a few users' /home/username directories from nfs, but have a couple others live on the local disk. Unfortunately, when trying to use the local disk directory, I was running into permissions errors.

After some research, I read man auto.master 5 a bit more carefully, and found this:

For direct maps the mount point is always specified as:
     /-
and the key used within the direct map is the full path to the 
mount point. The direct map may have multiple entries in the  master map.

So, in auto.master, you would have a line like:

/- auto.misc --timeout 60

In auto.misc:

/home/remoteuser <options> <nfsserver>:<path to home dir>

You can still have indirect mounts in the auto.misc file if you want. Just depends on how you want to organize your map files.

Note, this is on Ubuntu 16.04 and automount 5.1.1. I have not tested this on other OSes yet.