WebDav and remote filesystems

Ok, Windows WebDav support is more than lacking and it makes me sick!  WebDav and remote filesystems is one of the exciting things to hit PCs for years.  Apache already has support for a WebDav module called mod_dav.  Other offerings are available from Mac and Novell. 

 

I Hate Web Folders - a good look at what you have to do to get WebDav working with MS Window's WebFolders implementation. (this *MIGHT* work)

 

iFolder - iFolder is Novell's WebDav product.  What interests me is their free WebDav client that autosyncs the WebDav shares.  Hopefully I'll figure out how to integrate their iFolder client with the free mod_dav.

 
NetDrive is the simple client that you can use for windows.  It comes for free with NetWare 6 and it is free to distribute.  I can't seem to find the link on Novell's site but it available on all sorts of sites on the web.

With NetDrive you can use standard drive mapping (and use Drag and Drop) that points to a user's iFolder directory on the iFolder server. So you can get encrypted access directly to iFolder server without synchronization.

That means there are three ways to access iFolder data:

• iFolder client (with sync)
• Web Browser
• NetDrive.

Just select the one that?s best for you or use them all!

For complete instructions about installing and using NetDrive, see the Novell NetDrive Administration Guide

 

WebDav - Webdav is broken, this is information I found from some samba site.  *Useful*
Just to inform you that things at MS are apparently not about to change soon :)

Many of you have noticed the XP redirector does not work well with mod_dav,
notably when URLs are password-protected. The XP redirector sends erroneously
something like DOMAIN\login:password when it should only send login:password

The net use command is also buggy, except when used with the following syntax:
net use * http://xxx/yy /u:login password
If you use this instead:
net use * http://xxx/yy /u:login
(which prompts for the password interactively) it does not work.

Additionally, you must set high values for the KeepAlive-related parameters of
Apache, because otherwise the redirector loses the credentials after a while
and asks for them often, until it finally trasmits empty credentials, whatever
you input.

Furthermore, the credentials are cached, meaning that if you change a login on
the server while an XP client is already connected, the XP clients prompts for
credentials (of course), but DOES NOT send what you type in, but re-sends the
old credentials instead. You need to delete the network shortcut, reboot, and
recreate it again to empty the cache.

The silly answer from MS, which was contacted on this, is that they probably
won't fix the damn thing because , quote: "modifications of this part of the
code are likely to imply regression in the Passport authentications". Glad to
hear Passport uses basic authentication :) They don't explain why all other
DAV or plain HTTP clients they have (the WebFolders client, the IE client, the
Explorer Web Client) work normally.

Well, I guess it could be possible to resort to a specific apache auth module
that would strip off the domain part if the client is this catastrophic XP
WebDAV-Miniredir redirector (maybe this already exists, does anybody know?)
but what a shame...

Here, we'll use the stupid workaround of duplicating our very small users
database, prefixing the login with a dummy domain string. But this won't help
if you use an external (say, LDAP, maybe) users database which cannot be
modified.

Created: 2006-01-10 16:38:47 Modified: 2014-04-24 00:39:24