Accessing WebDAV Folders on Linux? 26
Saqib Ali asks: "I was wondering if any Slashdot readers are accessing WebDAV folders on their Linux box. I heavily use DAV folders to store files and documents. On a Windows machine, I can easily access them using WebFolder or native DAV support in MS Office Suite. But when I switch to my Linux box, I have a hard time accessing the files on the DAV folders. I haven't seen any application on Linux that support DAV natively. OpenOffice/StartOffice don't support DAV either. I know there is nautilus which uses gnome-vfs to access files on DAV, but that doesn't help if the apps don't support DAV themselves. Are there Linux app that support DAV natively? How about integerating gnome-vfs into OpenOffice? Any ideas?" For those who just want access to the files, and don't mind the extra steps, you can use utilities like Cadaver but probably, what many of you might be looking for is a simple file system driver. What are you usin to access your DAV resources?
Because no one knows what you're talking about (Score:3, Informative)
Briefly: WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning". It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.
Re:Because no one knows what you're talking about (Score:1, Interesting)
Oi, credit webdav.org with that ;)
Also, WebDAV is FTP done right. If you've ever had problems with FTP getting through firewalls (particularly multiple firewalls) then try webdav. It's not just port 80 to get through firewalls, it uses a subset of HTTP//1.1 to do the basic read/write stuff and it uses it's own open standards to do versioning/file-locking/etc.
Die FTP... DIE!
It's faster than FTP too (ftp requires a
Re:Because no one knows what you're talking about (Score:1)
I thought it would be obvious enough that I could safely omit it.
Re:Because no one knows what you're talking about (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Because no one knows what you're talking about (Score:1, Informative)
This specification provides versioning, configuration management, workspaces, and logical change tracking capabilities.
First out the door with an implementation is the Subversion [tigris.org] project, which is developing an Open Source replacement for CVS.
While we're at it, two other WebDAV specifications nearing completion are:
WebDAV Access Control Protocol [webdav.org]
DAV Searching and Locating Protocol [greenbytes.de]
Uhm (Score:3, Informative)
Well, KDE 3 [kde.org] supports WebDAV. If you use Konqi to browse to your WebDAV folder, you can open the documents therein with any app - KDE copies it to a tempfile, then re-uploads it when the editor terminates. At least, that's how it works for the other protocols, e.g. FTP. KDE native programs upload the file on every save.
There's a WebDAV mode for [X]Emacs [gohome.org], and Emacs/w3 supports WebDAV.
Of course, if you go with DavFS, any Linux app can access WebDAV servers.
Re:Uhm (Score:2, Insightful)
DavFS (Score:2, Informative)
Seems like they've got what you're looking for.
Re:DavFS (Score:1)
[sorry, couldn't resist.]
caDAVer (Score:2)
I use a command line client with the horrible name cadaver [webdav.org]. Cadaver can run WebDAV over SSL (https) for secure remote operation.
Cadaver is a part of Redhat (at least on 7.3), runs on MAC OS X, and a cygwin port is available for Windows.
davfs works well... (Score:5, Informative)
It was easy enough to compile for my RH7.1 system, you just need the kernel headers installed, and you can build/install the module, and then use mount.davfs to mount a location just like a samba share. It supports user auth. and you can compile in ssl support (a must in my book
My only issue is that you need to choose your mount point carefully, as an 'ls' even on the directory containing the mount point can take a second or two to complete (since the fs needs to perform a propget on the server); so I suggest placing your mount point in a subdirectory that you will only access when you're doing dav work... (ie not in your home directory). Other than that, it's great. I love it especially because it very tolerant of the server restarting/going offline, since it's just http gets and doesn't have any "state" like nfs.
I've also mounting the drives on XP and OSX, which makes sharing documents (even securely to my office box over ssl) very cool. And setting up a dav share is just like setting up any other web location in apache (I use the mod_dav that ships with RH7.2 for my server...)
In short, very cool stuff.
Re:davfs works well... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:davfs works well... (Score:1)
Re:davfs works well... (Score:1)
My only issue with davfs is that 'umount' doesn't work for me. The docs don't say it's a problem, so maybe I'm doing something wrong.
Anyone else have this problem?
As far as speed, it's faster than my local CDROM when I'm connecting to a server 20 miles away through a DSL line, but on a cable modem across the Pacific, the latency is pretty nasty. It's still faster than running the commands to scp the file manually.
Nautilus does WebDAV (Score:2, Insightful)
Yum!
OpenOffice (Score:1)
Re:OpenOffice (Score:1)
Kiwi file system (Score:2)
Compilation errors with DAVFS on linux-2.4.7-10 (Score:1)
Broken kernel or too old? Re:Compilation errors... (Score:2)
This is a typical problem installing from source with Linux--something is probably broken in either the source or your setup. Some idiots insist that compiling and installing is "not that time-consuming" and "not as tempermental as [I] suggest"--yeah right. Gotta love the open source "community". ;-)
The line appears to use a macro called MODULE_LICENSE . It appears to allow a module to store which type of license it falls under...interesting. The macro is in my 2.4.17 kernel source and the program/module seems to compile find on my machine. Could the macro be something new?
Perhaps the macro is only in the newer kernels, or maybe the patch added to your kernel breaks it somehow. (usually extra numbers indicate your kernel was patched/modified by the distro maintainers--I'm assuming this is the case.) I would suggest just getting the newest kernel from kernel.org. You'll lose whatever patches were made to that kernel, however I think this is a good thing unless you really really need what the patch does. In fact I recommend upgrading to a newer kernel anyway, as 2.4.7 was still in the stage where there were those funky problems.