As part of a (larger, speculative) project, I’ve been looking for a simple, relatively secure technology to extend file system access out to roaming client machines, without the weight and complexity of a VPN. For now, webDAV seems to be working nicely, in the simple applications with which I’m working. A few notes for anyone interested in getting this to work with Windows clients:
Under Windows 2000, webDAV shares can be added as ‘Network Places’ — under XP, pre SP2, you supposedly need to use syntax similar to http://myusername@my.web.address:80/share, but that doesn’t work on any of the machines I tested. Under SP2, Basic Authentication is disabled by default, so to have any chance of getting it to work, you need to set a nonzero value to the DWORD registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/ CurrentControlSet/Services/WebClient/Parameters/UseBasicAuth. But that still didn’t get me anywhere, so I went out in search of clients.
Novell’s NetDrive is apparently free, and works well on XP. Netdrive also enables selection of basic cacheing and locking parameters (a good thing). The only problem I could find with Netdrive is that on a non-domain machine with multiple users attempting to mount network drives simultaneously, the Netdrive service dies, which is a little unhelpful.
Netdrive, it seems, is an OEMed version of South River Technologies’ commercial WebDrive product. WebDrive offers more options, supports more backend services and proxies (including SOCKS), and is robust on multi-user machines. It’s simple, straightforward, and it works.
I haven’t yet looked at mounting webDAV shares under OS X and Linux. Supposedly there are bugs in early versions of OS X with this (no surprises there). Under Linux, davfs seems to be the OS-level answer. Evidently the Nautilus file manager can also mount webDAV shares directly.
So much for the client side. On the server I’m running Apache/mod_dav. For the application I have in mind, I will probably need dynamic generation of content: currently Slide from Apache loosk the most promising way forward. More on that later.
Adding the DWORD value for UseBasicAuth worked for me on SP2 after restarting the machine. You may be able to get away with restarting the WebClient service, but I didn’t try it that way.
Comment by Jason Ward — Tuesday 5 April 2005 @ 1:06 am