Re: WevDAV anyone?

Dancer (dancer@zeor.simegen.com)
Mon, 28 Jun 1999 14:09:13 +1000


Christian Scholz wrote:
>
> Hi there!
>
> I recently tested the WebDAV extensions to Windows and well, it's cool :)
>
> I am not wondering if anyone wants to do something like that under
> Linux (means, writing a webdav filesystem which acts as a client.
> A webdav server in addition to NFS would maybe also be interesting
> but maybe not that important..)
> Or if someone maybe has started already..
>
> For anyone not knowing what DAV is: It stands for "Distributed
> Authoring and Versioning" and is an extension to HTTP which allows
> read/write access for web servers and thus replacing proprietary
> protocols like FrontPage Server Extensions and the like.
> Of course it is not bound to it's use for web servers but also for
> any other types of file sharing.
>
> More information about WebDAV: http://www.webdav.org/
>
> best,
> Christian
>
> PS: I am quite interested in it as I am right now writing a shared
> workspace software which will then also act as DAV server and it
> would be cool to test it all under Linux.

There's a webdav module for apache. It works quite well.

I _am_ dubious about the IE5 'WebFolders' thing, which essentially
implements a network file-system over HTTP. I think HTTP is already
pretty heavily abused and overloaded.

Of course, it can be argued that the basic set of filesystem operations
is (very loosely) semantically equivalent to the basic HTTP ops (get a
file, put a file, get information about a file, that sort of thing), and
that WebDav fills the holes with rename, delete and such.

It doesn't stop me being more and more dubious about it. Outlook now
reads mail off some servers through HTTP/WebDav (but adding custom
methods that are _like_ but not the _same_ as the DAV ones). Don't try
to convince me that that is a good idea.

If everything cheerfully whizzes through HTTP without clear URI
namespacing, it becomes VERY hard for an administrator to monitor,
analyze, and (if necessary) restrict traffic.

D

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