Mounting FTP Directory as a Filesystem

I just discovered a really useful trick to mount the directory structure of a remote FTP server as a directory on a linux computer.   You use a program called curlftps.   On Ubuntu do:

sudo apt-get install curlftps

The directories on the remote ftp server are then mounted using:

 curlftpfs ftp://[username]:[password]@[server address] [local directory mount point] 

This works fine (you do not even need to be root to do it), but the password will be present if you do 'ps -ef | grep ftp'.
A solution is to create a .netrc file in the /root directory containing:

machine [server address]

login [username]
password [password]

You can then add the file system to /etc/fstab by adding the following line to /etc/fstab:

curlftpfs#[server address] [local directory mount point] fuse allow_other,rw,user,noauto 0 0

You can then just do

sudo mount [local directory mount point]

and you get the same effect with the server password invisible.