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Debian etch webdav issues

I was setting up my webdav (which I had not used since I upgraded my debian installation to etch from sarge) to talk to Windows XP and ran into a couple of unexpected issues.

AuthDigestFile becomes AuthUserFile
Somewhere in the upgrade to etch the AuthDigestFile directive went invalid (I recall I just disabled my webdav site when i upgraded). and is now AuthUserFile. Otherwise everything else stays the same.

XP forces NTLM Authentication
When I tried adding my web dav as a network place using my username / password the authentication failed and in the windows authentication box I saw servername/username instead of just my username. I did a bit of digging around various webpages and found a few client and a few server fixes. The easiest one for me was to create a new user in the form of user@server that bypassed the windows forcing NTLM authentication bug.

Etch denies DavLockDB
Finally I was able to connect but then I noticed that both cadaver (which I was using as a sanity check) and windows could not write to the dav. Windows reported the error a device attached to the system is not functioning. In Cadaver I was receiving an I/O error. It turned out that the apache2 user (www-data) could not write to the DavLockDB which was at /var/lock/apache2/DAVLock. I changed the owner of that file to www-data and from that point on the WebDAV was functional from both cadaver and WindowsXP.

The Windows XP authentication error was something I would have encountered but the sarge => etch upgrade path did not make it easy for my WebDAV. I am not sure if there was a reason why the DavLOCK database was no longer accesible to www-data (perhaps the default location for this database was moved) or why the Apache directive for digest authentication changed.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 8:33 am and is filed under debian, geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Debian etch webdav issues”

  1. Stuart Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 4:26 am

    Hi there,

    I found the same problem with XP & NTLM, thanks very much for posting that, I was pulling my hair out!

    Problem I had was when changing from Digest to AuthUserFile I got a 500 server error.

  2. Paolo Alexis Falcone Says:
    September 13th, 2007 at 10:51 pm

    You need to add the AuthDigestProvider directive, e.g.

    AuthDigestProvider file
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/digest_pw

  3. Thomas W. Says:
    December 18th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    Thanks… I had to reinstall my Debian and my Webdav didn’t work anymore. Your little hint with the DAVlock saved my day. Damn those rightes… How needs them anyway ;)

    Thx a lot!

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