xgrr.de – the whole not the half

Yeah. Streaming isn’t that compatible with firewalls around the world especially in corporate situations. So I needed to figure out a better solution to get to my precious files without hassle. The solution: WebDAV.

I allready use WebDAV in combination with Subversion. DAV is an extension to the HTTP protocol which allows you also to upload files onto the webserver. This makes FTP useless and with some tricky tools it also integrates quite nicely in your desktop environment.

I have a 2 tier setup. At home my server features a Apache2 with enabled WebDAV. Configured as follows:

Alias /share /path/to/your/files

<Location /share>
	Header add MS-Author-Via "DAV"

	BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.[012]" redirect-carefully
	BrowserMatch "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider" redirect-carefully
	BrowserMatch "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600" redirect-carefully
	BrowserMatch "^WebDrive" redirect-carefully
	BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS" redirect-carefully

	DAV on
	AuthType Basic
	AuthName Share
	AuthUserFile /path/to/your/.htpasswd
	Require valid-user
</Location>

And on my Windows XP PC there is a nice tool from Novell running called NetDrive. As this tool could not be provided by Novell directly due to license issues I put it here for download (they especially mention to look for netdrive.exe on Google. So I think it shouldn’t hurt ).

With NetDrive you can mount the share like a network share as a normal drive and also can access it as such. With this solution you have all-time access to you files without need for any kind of strange solution which can issue other problems like NAT for instance.