As I'm running an old kernel inside the debootstrap it's possible Bart's solution may give trouble. However, I seem to have found a nice solution via a post on the net that gave the hint. Here's what I did: 1) Inside the VM, I installed ssh and edited sshd_config so the port is 9922. 2) In my client machine I added a config file in /home/ME/.ssh that has the structure Host machine1 Hostname firewall.my_network.com Port 22 HostKeyAlias machine1 Host machine2 Hostname firewall.my_network.com Port 9922 HostKeyAlias machine2 3) Then I had to make sure the known_hosts file was OK by running ssh to both "machines". I even set up gftp to do it nicely, which was what I wanted all along i.e., to be able to directly load stuff to my VM user. Main purpose of all this is to share private (but not secret) files with some colleagues and friends so that they can access them via the web to the http://machine/~VMuser/ locations. Thanks anyway to Bart. I'll try to learn the mounts sometime. JN