[GLLUG] WebDAV

[Charles Ulrich]

On Monday 09 April 2007 16:25, Dan Ryan wrote:
> Hello everybody!
>
> 	I've been putting together a headless linux box this past week, and
> would like to enable WebDAV for drag-and-drop filesharing over the
> internet.  Does anyone have experience setting this up?  I understand
> there are a few other options out there as well.  I'd be really
> interested in hearing what other people have done.

Hi Dan,

WebDAV is really easy to set up in Apache. I don't have the exact 
directives in front of me, but I can look them up later if I get the 
time. WebDAV is cool because nearly every modern OS has at least one 
native way to interface with WebDAV shares:

- Linux has a variety of command-line utilities, pseudo-filesystems, and 
graphical browsers. Though my favorite is just opening konqueror and 
entering webdav://server.com/path.

- Microsoft refers to WebDAV as "Web Folders". Feh. But otherwise it's 
more or less like mapping a network drive.

- OS X doesn't call WebDAV anything, if I recall. You just open the 
"Connect to Server" dialog, type in your address, and then it shows up 
as a network drive. Very nearly a hidden feature.

And best of all, because WebDAV is built on top of HTTP, you get 
authentication and encryption for free. Of course there is a downside 
to being built on HTTP as well: no random file access. You must 
download an entire file before you can do anything with it. For 
instance, if you want to watch movies or listen to music, the whole 
thing gets downloaded into /tmp before being opened. In this regard, 
WebDAV doesn't quite replace Samba and NFS. But if you just want to 
move stuff around and open smallish files, WebDAV could work fine.

-- 
Charles Ulrich
Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com