WebDAV File System Setup

Setting up a WebDAV File System

One of the websites I'm responsible for changed the upload area of its live server to a secured WebDAV share.

At first I thought, OK, no problem, I'll just choose WebDAV in Dreamweaver's Remote Site dialog, and I'm done. Not quite so, as it turned out. The WebDAV share I wanted to connect to was only accessible via https using a certificate. And even though the documentation didn't say so, Dreamweaver 8 only seems to support WebDAV uploads via http.

So I had to look for other ways to access the WebDAV share. I decided to set up a davfs2 file system on my Linux computer, and then mount the remote WebDAV share. Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Install fuse-davfs2 using yum.
  2. Create a davfs2 operating system user group and add the following users to this group: root, <local_user>
  3. Create a local directory for mounting the WebDAV share later:<local_mount_directory>
  4. In /etc/updatedb.conf, exclude this directory from indexing by updatedb.
  5. Enter this directory into the /etc/fstab file:
https://<webdav_share> <local_mount_directory> davfs user,noauto 0 0
  1. Enter the following information in the /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf file:
# General Options
# ---------------
dav_user      <local_user>    # system wide config file only
dav_group     davfs2          # system wide config file only
# WebDAV Related Options
# ----------------------
servercert      <public_key>.pem
clientcert      <private_key>.p12
ask_auth        1
  1. Copy the following files (and subdirectories) into the ~/.davfs directory:
/etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf
/etc/davfs2/secrets
/etc/davfs2/certs/<public_key>.pem
/etc/davfs2/certs/<private_key>.p12
  1. Change the permissions for your private key: chmod 600 <private_key>.p12
  2. Change to the ~/.davfs/certs/private/ directory. To mount the remote WebDAV share, enter the following command:
mount <local_mount_directory>
Please enter the username to authenticate with proxy
proxy.xxx.xxx or hit enter for none.
Username: [ENTER]
Please enter the password to authenticate user anonymous with server
https://<webdav_share> or hit enter for none.
Password: [ENTER]
/sbin/mount.davfs: the server certificate is not trusted
issuer: XXXX
subject: XXXX
identity: XXXX
fingerprint: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
You only should accept this certificate, if you can verify the fingerprint! The server might be faked or there might be a man-in-the-middle-attack.
Accept certificate for this session? [y,N] y

Result

You can now access the WebDAV share via the normal file explorer.

Remember to unmount the WebDAV share after you have finished uploading your files using the umount command.

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