[UFO Chicago] Network fileshares

[Ian Bicking]

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 02:04, Larry Garfield wrote:
> Nate was rather taken with it, but I never really played with it since 
> my main file sharing would be between my GNU/Linux box and my Windows 
> box, and Windows supports only SMB and now WebDAV.  I've never cared for 
> Samba (mostly because SMB is an absolutely horrid protocol as far as I 
> can tell), and as you say WebDAV still needs a little work, although I 
> really need to look into it again.  Maybe we should try playing with it 
> together, and see how far we get.

I actually got the DAV stuff working without too much trouble.  On the
server end it's pretty easy -- mod_dav is easy to install, and easy to
enable (just put "DAV On" in a <Directory> section -- HTTP
authentication for authorization, SSL for security).

There's a filesystem client at dav.sf.net, which wasn't too hard to
install.  I had to compile the kernel with Coda support, and then just
do the configure/make routine, and it worked, no problem.  But it's
somewhat limited -- the worst part is that there's annoying latency and
no caching, so doing "ls" takes as long as getting or saving a file. 
Only 1 second, but that's still enough to annoy me.

It's also not very featureful.  It doesn't have any idea about
permissions, including the executable bit (too bad, since mod_dav has a
simple extension just for that).  WebDAV has all the structure to be a
full filesystem, but they just don't pick up on it.  If I was into C,
it'd be fun to hack -- the code is actually pretty compact.

There's command-line clients that act like FTP clients, but obviously
that's not the sort of thing I'm looking for.

  Ian