[Laurence]

I'm creating a small internal web site for my company and I'd like to be able to link directly to .dmg files on our server. I thought there was a way to mount a .dmg file over HTTP, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. I then thought that I'd just use afp links... (afp://server.local/path/test.dmg) This sort of worked... I got to the server at least, but it prompted me for credentials and would NOT allow guest access. Guest access is turned on on the server. Once I entered my credentials just to test it just opened a window with the root of the sharepoint. It did not attempt to mount the image itself.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial/informational site that would have any information about how to accomplish what I want? I just don't want all the employees to have to download the images before viewing them. Right now they just log into the server manually to access the .dmg files, but a nice web interface would be much easier for the newer employees to understand. The server is running 10.4.x server and the site is being build with PHP and SQL if that matters.

Thanks in advance!

[besson3c]

There is a separation between a web browser and your OS designed for a purpose. It is not a good idea to be able to open disk images and such via a web browser.

What you can do is provide an interface to download the dmg files through your web browser just by turning on Apache directory indexing. Once the file has been downloaded, it would be up to the user to install this software.

[Laurence]

I realize that this would never be a good idea on a public web site, however we have many images that employees need to access quite often and many of them are several gigabytes in size. Having hundreds of people download hundreds of various images that change from time to time is not going to be possible.

I figured out the issue with the authentication... It was a stupid, server side mistake on my part. The problem is that minimally I would like a web-based link to just mount the .dmg files, if that isn't possible is it possible to make a web link that would open a subdirectory of an afp share?

Right now I have the link set up like this...
afp://;AUTH=No%20User%[email protected]/Public/mac/product001/image001.dmg
however when I click on the image it mounts the Public share, but doesn't even open the "mac" folder. If it can't actually mount the image is there a way to have it open a specific folder so the image will just be there to double-click on after the share mounts?

BTW, I have seen references to a disk:// URL handler in my various searches, however it does not seem to work at all... any idea what's up with that? From what I've read that worked in 10.2, but hasn't since then. ???

[besson3c]

Why not just come up with an automated way of mounting the AFP share? I wouldn't rely on an undocumented trick like this that may not work consistently across browsers.

If you can't get your AFP trick to work, you could certainly write a scripts that would mount the server over SSHfs using public keys setup on each machine, mount the remote volume, and invoke the installer. Such a script could be easily revised for each app.

I don't know if this is a helpful solution, because I guess I don't really understand why you want to do this through the web this way.

[Peter]

theres an app called "URL Runner" that should generate these links for you... I cant for the life of me find it though.
Will post back when I can find it.

[Laurence]

Thanks!

I found UrlRunner (Part of "Searchlight") and it works... It is exactly what I was looking for...

Now I'm wondering if you have any idea how it works? I ran it and then quit it. There are no processes/daemons left behind that I can see. There are no input managers, launchdaemons, etc added and yet, it still works just fine. Just running it once seems to have added the ability to use URLs such as urlrunner://file///Users/<username>/Desktop/test.txt

It's not that important really, but I'm curious if you know how this is possible without some sort of background task handling these new URLs?

[besson3c]

Does it load a kernel extension? If so, it would appear in the list generated by a "kextstat" in your Terminal.