When mounting hdfs using fuse-dfs, there is no user who acts as a superuser

There is a long discussion thread here:

https://groups.google.com/a/cloudera.org/group/cdh-user/browse_frm/thread/cb22106a2aa395ed/b16d50b254bd9c5d?lnk=gst&q=fuse#b16d50b254bd9c5d

The main problem I am trying to solve is that I want to mount hdfs as a normal filesystem on a machine that can do automated backups of a subset of the data. For that, I prefer to use a superuser that can see all the files regardless of permissions or groups. However, when I mount hdfs using fuse-dfs, there is no user who acts as a superuser. Instead I either get permission denied or files just do not appear (depending on whether I use root or hdfs to run the mount command) if the files and directories are not world-readable. In my installation we intend to use permissions to control access, so making everything world-readable is not workable.

It is also not entirely clear if I'm meant to mount it as root or as hdfs, but the problem persists regardless of which way it is done. However, the README for fuse-dfs and the wiki page on cloudera (https://ccp.cloudera.com/display/CDHDOC/Mountable+HDFS) suggests putting the mount command in /etc/fstab, and there doesn't appear to be a way to do that as the hdfs user currently. This can be worked around, but is not ideal. Some discussion on the cdh user thread said that mounting as the hdfs user was the correct way, but this is not documented.

When mounted as root, an additional problem is that even a particular user's files will not be accessible as them. This problem does not appear when mounted as hdfs. This is not critical for my application, however.

It isn't entirely clear to me if this issue belongs with cloudera or upstream (or maybe both).