[KLUG Members] RE: WebDAV Support Pretty Good

[Bob Kanaley]

Adam,

Thanks for the huge dose of humble pie.
I take back all those things I said about you restoring some of my sanity.

I put up a couple of intranet apache WebDAV servers at the beginning of this
year (apache 1.3.23, dav 1.03). It only took me about a day and a half to
get things setup and working!!! (In my own defense, prior to Apache 2 WebDAV
support was not built-in).

> While my huge stack of pancakes digested I decided to take a
> look at this.
> Apparently WebDAV support is pretty solid.
>
> Setting up a WebDAV share via apache,  with mod_dav
> incluceded in RedHat,
> was laughably trivial.
>

I was trying to setup an intranet site to accomplish a couple of workgroup
type things. One goal was to setup a workgroup repository where files shared
by workgroups could be edited by the workgroup and viewed by others via
links from the LAN homepage. By using WebDAV, access to files by Win98
clients could be regulated and logged. The other goal was to establish a
location where my windbloz clients could publish their Outlook 2000
calendars and free/busy times to share across the LAN.

The drag and drop or copy and paste, create files and folders from winbloz
explorer to the apache webdav server via Web Folders worked great. And if
they have the permissions on the web server, the winbloz clients can simply
double-click on a file in a mapped Web Folder to open the file for editing
(I'm surprised this didn't work in linux).

But, for some reason the Outlook 2000 "Save as webpage" would initiate a
"publish to the web" dialog whenever I would select the WebDAV Web Folder as
the destination location.

Unfortunately, the "publish to web" wizard in Outlook 2000 does not
understand WebDAV well enough to save the data to the WebDAV server. I even
tried setting up an NT box with apache with WebDAV enabled and front page
extensions on to try to get this working. Same problem as on Linux, i.e. the
problem is with the M$ "publish to web" wizard, not WebDAV.

I ran out of time for that project, but my next step would have been to
setup samba on that box, then share the web publishing directory for the
calendar info and have Outlook 2K save to this directory. I am doing
something like this to publish the corporate calendar to a winbloz PWS
directory. It's messy but works.

> Nautilus (GNOME VFS) when recieving the URL
> "http://localhost" said: Oh,
> thats a WebDAV server.  I was able to delete files (right
> click, delete)
> and drag-n-drop files into it, drag-n-drop files from it.
>
> One still can't "open" files into applications from there,
> but thats no
> big deal.
>
> "Properties" dealt with it, saying there was no permission on the
> specified object; which seemed a pretty clean way to handle it.
>
> Authentication and access control works with all the
> mod_auth* modules.
>
> Basically it seems like a simple brainless client way to
> share some files,
> which is what I was looking for.
>
> There is even a project that allows mounting a WebDAV share as a
> filesystem - http://dav.sourceforge.net/  But that isn't what I'm
> interested in.

Bob

Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk@agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com