There are some places even root can’t get to. One such place is a FUSE mounted volume. I found this out when trying to access an sshfs mounted directory as root and got permission denied.

To get around this, do the following (which I learnt by asking about it on serverfault):

1. Add user_allow_other to /etc/fuse.conf
2. Run sshfs (or any other FUSE mounting command) with -o allow_root option.