#23 WebDAV mount Read Only

[Gavin Young]

I have successfully installed DAVFS2 (v0.2.8) onto our
CentOS 4.2 server and I can mount a WebDAV share but
after mounting I am unable to write files to it.

/etc/fstab
http://servername/servlet/webdav.documents
/file_drives/webdav davfs user,noauto 0 0

When I try to copy a file onto the mount point:
# cp /root/example.log /file_drives/webdav

I get this error message:
cp: cannot create regular file
`/file_drives/atane_webdav/example.log':
Input/output error

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Gavin

[Werner Baumann]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1260327

Hello Gavin,

does the server allow writing?
You may have a look at the log files of the server. There
should be logged the requests from davfs2 together with the
error code of the response.
You may also look at the log files of the client whether
there are any entries from mount.davfs, coda or neon.

Greetings
Werner

[Gavin Young]

Logged In: YES
user_id=737269

The WebDAV share was being provided through Tomcat and when
we checked the Tomcat logs on the server I found errors like:
DATE StandardContext[/servlet]documents: LOCK: /example.log

After adding "nolocks" to the mounting options within
/etc/fstab everything works correctly.

Final /etc/fstab line looks like this:
http://servername/servlet/webdav.documents
/file_drives/webdav davfs user,noauto,nolocks 0 0

Thanks for the quick reply!

Gavin

[Gavin Young]

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user_id=737269

When trying to sync between the mounted WebDAV dir and a
local dir using unison we are receiving errors such as this:
DATE StandardContext[/servlet]documents: Filename: .#Mail
shot incl env.doc.22632b9285219a0ff0e9e76ee7cab0ac.unison.tmp
DATE StandardContext[/servlet]documents: Mime:
application/octet-stream
DATE StandardContext[/servlet]documents: Overwrite true not
supported in MOVE request.
DATE StandardContext[/servlet]documents: Overwrite true not
supported in MOVE request.

It looks like unison creates a tmp file and then uses the mv
command to reneame. Do you know of any solution to the above
error messages?

[Werner Baumann]

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user_id=1260327

Hello Gavin,

one remark about Tomcat:
If you can configure Tomcat to allow locks, this would be
the better solution. If you don't use locks, one user might
overwrite the changes of another user.

Unison:
I am not familiar with unison (I don't even know what it
is). So I assume: Unison is an application, running on your
client and accesing the mounted davfs2 file system.
Some application (e.g. gedit and propably unison) indeed
create a temporary copy of the file to edit. They edit that
copy and when finished they do a 'mv temp-copy original'.
That is okay. davfs2 now uses the HTTP MOVE-method to
replace the original on the server by the temporal copy
(that is on the server too). Some servers don't
allow/support this.

I am sorry to tell that I see no quick solution for davfs2
to overcome this problem. It would be possible, but it would
be quite a lot of work to do.

I am working on a new version of davfs2 (and therefore have
not much time for big changes in the old version) and I
think I found an (at least partial) solution for this: I
hold this temporal copies local and when finished upload
them to the server with the PUT method. It works with gedit.

If you are intersted to try this solution, you will find the
source code in our CVS repository, branch
'select-coda-version'. But it is beta-code (at best, maybe
still alpha, I don't know) and not ready for production use,
testing only. And still worse: documentation is imcomplete
and partially outdated.

Greetings
Werner

P.S.: Maybe there is a chance to have a look at the server
configuration and enable 'MOVE with overwrite' (would be the
best solution at the moment).