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Brian Duff's Old Weblog

 Tuesday, January 20, 2004


WebDAV, Windows and Linux

One of the potentially nicer features of Windows XP is its built-in support for WebDAV, an HTTP-based file system. I use webdav a lot at work to publish files to internal and external sites.

Some form of WebDAV support has existed since Windows 2000 in the form of "Web Folders". However, Web Folders don't act like a normal file system because you can't just open a remote file in any application and edit it directly like a local file.

Windows XP should have solved this problem. It allows you to map network drives directly to webdav shares. However, in practice, it rarely works properly unless you happen to be using Microsoft IIS on the server. In particular, authentication is severely broken.

You can buy various commercial products that allow you to map a network drive to webdav. However, today I managed to get Windows network drives mapped to webdav without any additional software on the Windows machine. On my Gentoo linux box, I installed davfs2. This allows you to mount webdav shares as linux file systems. I then exported the linux mount points using samba. End result: I can now access webdav shares via a network drivein Windows, and edit files live on the server. Me == happy :)


7:20:53 PM     comment []


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© Copyright 2004 Brian Duff. Last Updated 1/24/2004; 3:05:35 PM. Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.