[DominikHoffmann]

I want to mirror a WebDAV host. I was planning on mounting a WebDAV host in /Volumes/ and using rsync to do the trick. I discovered the mount_webdav client command. It has two shortcomings:

1. It doesn't do secure http (https).
2. Passing login credentials is a pain in the butt (cf. a Perl script example or one requiring the awkward creation of a password file)

Furthermore, for some reason neither example works.

My system.log contains lines such as

Code:
Jun  9 20:04:56 xserve webdavd[28889]: main: realpath(): Input/output error

Has anyone gotten this to work properly?

Dominik Hoffmann

[DominikHoffmann]

Getting closer!

Part of the problem was that I had a non-functioning mount in /Volumes/ft1. It took a

Code:
sudo umount -f -t webdav /Volumes/ft1
sudo rmdir /Volumes/ft1

to get rid of it.

Dominik Hoffmann

[DominikHoffmann]

So, here is what I'm trying to do:

I have a file called Password, which contains User ID and password in the form needed by the mount_webdav commmand. The mounting operation is supposed to take place through the command

Code:
cat Password | mount_webdav -a0 http://ft1.mydomain.com/dir1/dir2 /Volumes/ft1

. A subsequent

Code:
cd /Volumes/ft1

results in an error

Code:
cd: could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Input/output error

from which I can only recover through the umount command as described in my previous post.

Any comments?

[DominikHoffmann]

My system.log contains these lines:

Code:
Jun  9 21:03:25 xserve webdavd[29546]: http_parse_response_header: redirection not supported: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Jun  9 21:03:25 xserve webdavd[29546]: http_mount: http_parse_response_header(): Unknown error: 0
Jun  9 21:03:25 xserve webdavd[29546]: http://ft1.mydomain.com/ could not be mounted

[DominikHoffmann]

I should make a correction. I apparently don't have access to http://ft1.mydomain.com/. Instead, I have to use http://ft1.mydomain.com/transfer. With this change, the entries in system.log are:

Code:
Jun  9 22:26:41 xserve webdavd[473]: /Volumes/ft1 mounted
Jun  9 22:26:41 xserve webdavd[473]: main: accept(): Socket operation on non-socket

That's another reason why mount_webdav sucks: it doesn't output errors to STDOUT, but to the system log. An attempt to

Code:
ls -la /Volumes/ft1

results in the error

Code:
ls: /Volumes/ft1: Input/output error

[DominikHoffmann]

I just spoke with the admin of the WebDAV server to which I am trying to connect. He emailed me the following excerpt from the Tomcat log of his Linux box:

Code:
Slide_uri:/files/
Method:OPTIONS
TP-Processor11, 10-Jun-2005 13:53:43, dhoffmann, OPTIONS, 200 "OK", 1 ms, /files/ WebDAVFS/1.2.8 (01288000) Darwin/7.9.0 (Power Macintosh)
Slide_uri:/files/
Method:PROPFIND
Config:scope URI/files
Config:servletPath/
Config:contextPath/transfer
Config:scope/files
Config:scope Length6
Config:Result/transfer
TP-Processor11, 10-Jun-2005 13:53:44, dhoffmann, PROPFIND, 207 "Multi-Status", 8 ms, /files/ WebDAVFS/1.2.8 (01288000) Darwin/7.9.0 (Power Macintosh)

There is no indication here whatsoever that an error occurred. I may have to go to the WebDAV mailing list to get further help.

[DominikHoffmann]

By the way, when after a mount_webdav attempt I was trying to see whether anything had been mounted, I saw the following on the command line:

Code:
xserve:/Library/CronItems/WebDAVScript admin$ cd /Volumes/ft1 
cd: could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Input/output error
cd: could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Input/output error
xserve:. admin$

I wonder why I get the error twice.

[DominikHoffmann]

I quickly set up a WebDAV server on our local Mac OS X Server box. I get the same behavior. This time I checked /var/log/httpd/access_log to see what's going on serverside:

Code:
xx.xx.xx.xx - dhoffmann [10/Jun/2005:18:01:16 -0400] "OPTIONS / HTTP/1.1" 200 0
xx.xx.xx.xx - dhoffmann [10/Jun/2005:18:01:16 -0400] "PROPFIND / HTTP/1.1" 207 277

It neither looks like there is anything unusual there, nor any errors. Meanwhile my system.log still has

Code:
Jun 10 22:01:16 xserve webdavd[11511]: /Volumes/cal mounted
Jun 10 22:01:16 xserve webdavd[11511]: main: accept(): Socket operation on non-socket

While it doesn't seem to be of consequence to my problems, a curious thing to note is that the system.log entries are in Zulu time, while all other entries there are in local time, and so are the ones in the httpd access_log.

[turtle777]

Just to let you know that you are not the only one looking at this post
Unfortunately, can't help you with your problem.

-t

[badtz]

did u ever resolve this? curious

[DominikHoffmann]

Originally Posted by badtz

did u ever resolve this? curious

I did not resolve this. I no longer work for the company where I would have liked to implement this, and while I was still working, I simply used Panic's Transmit utility.

Dominik Hoffmann