WebDAV
I’ve recently started using WebDAV to share files with a colleague at another University, for a joint project. Not a big deal, really. There are lots of ways to share files, including emailing them back and forth.
But the integration of WebDAV support in the MacOSX Finder is particularly nice. With a couple of mouseclicks, he can mount the shared DAV directory on his Desktop, double-click on files to open them, drag&drop files to/from his own hard drive. The Finder takes care to warn him if he attempts to overwrite a newer version of a file in the DAV directory. And the WebDAV protocol takes care of file-locking etc.
To set up a shared DAV directory, I needed to
- Create a directory, owned by
www.
- Configure the webserver to use that directory as a DAV share
<Directory /Users/distler/Sites/[sS][oO][mM][eE][dD][iI][rR]>
DAV On
AuthType Digest
AuthDigestFile /usr/local/apache2/var/davusers
AuthDigestGroupFile /usr/local/apache2/var/davgroups
AuthDigestDomain /~distler/somedir/
AuthName "dav"
AllowOverride None
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
require group youcantoo
</Directory>
- Create a digest password for my colleague, using
htdigest.
- Add him to the appropriate group in
/usr/local/apache2/var/davgroups.
Connecting to the server is as simple as hitting ⌘ -K in the Finder, typing in the URL (the Finder remembers recently-accessed URLs), and entering a password (which can be stored in the Keychain).
Sweet!
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Re: WebDAV
The right way to do this would of course be a CVS (or friends)
repository: Automatic versioning and merges if possible. The only
problem is, how do you convince your colleagues to learn how to use
it.
Or for that matter, how do you convince some unnamed faculty member to
use the computer at all. I’m now back to implementing the handwritten
corrections…
PS: As more web servers are going to run with selinux, one also has to
make sure that the security context of the directory allows the web
server access, e.g. fedora: “chcon -t
httpd_user_content_t www”
Re: WebDAV
Is this secure ? I once tried and couldn’t make it work encrypted. But that was a while ago and https support may have sneaked in…
So far I use webdav for managing/synching Bookmarks (OmniWeb) and iCal (not willing to shell out $100 for a .Mac account, for a feature that ought to be free), and I do not much care whether this is secure or not.
Re: WebDAV
I agree with Volker, that CVS is my prefered tool to write papers with more than one author. Versioning is great but merging is even more imporant as the typical paper is just one big TeX file and passing around the “is allowed to make changes”-pumpkin process is a) errorprone and b) stops (n-1) authors from typing. And yes, it is hard to convince the co-authors to use it and to teach them to actually do something when cvs commit reports conflicts.
But that step forward is even a greater achivement than teaching people not to send TeX files by cut and paste into email but to use the ‘power user feature’ “attachment” in the mail-client as this does not introduce the inverted exclamation marks in front of all paragraphs starting with From.
Re: WebDAV
CVS is passe now. subversion is far superior to CVS *AND* can be mounted AS a WebDAV share while still maintaining the complete version history and merge states!
Re: WebDAV
No, it’s not at all secure.
Trouble is Panther doesn’t do webdav over SSL. At all.
For no good reason, as far as I can make out. Using stunnel to forward a local port to https:// on the server is a possibility, but proxying DAV is tough (you need to patch the server since DAV by default uses absolute URLs for COPYs and MOVEs).
The good news is Tiger finally fixes this, with full webdavs:// support.
WebDAV on Tiger?
Are you actually running the server on Tiger as well or only the client? I am having serious issues with my WebDAV _server_ after ugrading it to Tiger (re-compiled httpd-2.0.54 from source with the same settings as what I sued before and what worked) but I just cannot get any file larger than 64k - all the downloads seem to be limited to a max of 64k? Since this also applies to my subversion checkouts, things are pretty much useless at the moment…
Re: Subversion and LOCK support - you might want to try and use the 1.2rc - it has LOCK support and autoversioning is supposed to work just fine with the Finder.
Re: WebDAV
I tried setting up a WebDAV space through Apache 2.0 with mod_dav and mod_dav_fs and SSL. However, I hate these endless username/password quotes. I have my own Certificate Authority and handed the users their own personal signed certificate. Unfortunately there seems to be no way whatsoever to tell the Finder which certificate to use to connect to a WebDAV repository through https. I told Apache to hard check the client certificate against my own Root cert. It works with Safari/Firefox etc because you can tell them to use a certain client cert (imported through a PKCS12 .p12 file). So much for a mature SSL/TLS based implementation in the Finder for these things…
Read the post
CalDAV
Weblog: Musings
Excerpt: Taking Apple's Calendar Server out for a spin.
Tracked: June 14, 2008 5:40 PM
Re: WebDAV
The right way to do this would of course be a CVS (or friends) repository: Automatic versioning and merges if possible. The only problem is, how do you convince your colleagues to learn how to use it.
Or for that matter, how do you convince some unnamed faculty member to use the computer at all. I’m now back to implementing the handwritten corrections…
PS: As more web servers are going to run with selinux, one also has to make sure that the security context of the directory allows the web server access, e.g. fedora: “chcon -t httpd_user_content_t www”