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I would also suggest using webDAV at home or setup remotely, and configure your calendar, contacts, bookmarks and other file-syncing that way (of course encrypting everything before it hits the wire).

Additionally, in September RMS wrote a great piece on Android that might be of interest to you. Also, this little nugget from Firefox developers doing a pseudo-Q/A on Reddit (i know, i'm sorry) regarding your privacy in the browser might also be of concern to you.

So, you'd like some kind of Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning tool? I wonder if there's anything out there which would do this thing; a good name for it would be WebDAV. Why, they would even register http://www.webdav.org/ for information! ;)

Seriously, this is the protocol Subversion uses if you use the apache module. It works well. And if you look for information on managing a web site with subversion, you'll likely find quite a few examples of doing exactly what you're asking for in later comments. I might have even written one of them about 8 years ago when I set up our web developers to do precisely what you asked for. ;) If you're working on windows, look in to TortoiseSVN for client purposes (unless you're using a tool which already integrates with a versioning system of some sort).

Well if it's just plain text they could open the file in an editor, highlight the text, and use copy/paste to drop it in a textarea field in an HTML form.

So let's make the problem harder. How would I have enabled uploading of a binary object in 2001? I'd do the same thing I do today; use "forms-based file uploading."

RFC 1867 defining "forms-based file uploads" appeared in 1995, some months before Berners-Lee and company released RFC 1945 proposing HTTP 1.0. HTML 3.2 (1997) defined the "file" input type that Web applications use for file uploads. That element is usually displayed as a text box into which a file path can be entered, along with a "Browse" button that opens the local file browser.

Of course, there were many other ways to upload a file to a web server by 2001. I wrote a PHP-based application for a legal foundation that enabled subscribed attorneys to share documents in an online archive. Members could register a document online. They'd then receive a mail message to which they would reply after attaching the file. The message included a unique code that so the file could be matched to the registration entry in the database. This worked especially well with people on services like AOL whose interfaces at the time were not friendly to RFC-1867 uploads. (Nowadays I'd probably use either WEBDAV or dspace depending on how much structure I'd need.)

Sometimes I'd use Samba to export directories from a Linux application server to the Windows desktops. Then staff members could simply drop HTML files into pre-determined folders and have them appear within the context of the website. Nowadays, though, I handle pretty much all the content editing on the browser side with forms and TinyMCE. That way I get reasonably clean HTML code as opposed to what you get from someone copying and pasting from Word into a text box.

I wouldn't have thought uploading files was a key obstacle in the way of platform-independent development in 2001. Surely there must have been some bigger roadblocks.

If you're talking about an application that periodically collects files from a Windows workstation, in 2001 I'd have used an automated shell script running smbclient to connect to the workstation using SMB/Netbios and collect the file(s). What happens next depends on the application. I often run PHP scripts from the command line to process text files because I know it well, because of the enormous array of functions it offers, and, frankly, because I've always found Perl's syntax rather intimidating. grep, sed, and awk go a long way, too. Automatically manipulate a graphic image? ImageMagick.

Obama's campaign was approached in the fall of 2008 by the NSA, to let him and Axelrod know that either the Chinese or the Russians hacked his campaign systems.

I'm not affiliated with any such group, but I did drop by campaign offices in the early part of the summer. I commented to three very separate people on the weaknesses I saw and that the systems would get cracked and approximately when (+/- 1 week). I contacted two of them after the breaches made the news. So far not even one has responded to my finely worded Told You So, accompanied by links to the news articles.

Just to pick a random vulnerability, the staffers did not appear to have Samba or even WebDAV over TLS. Instead it appears that documents were sent around, unencrypted via e-mail as attachments. That works fine if you're wanting to make archiving virtually impossible, waste storage like its going out of style, and ensure that each and every document has a fair chance of being intercepted.

Obama's campaign was approached in the fall of 2008 by the NSA, to let him and Axelrod know that either the Chinese or the Russians hacked his campaign systems.

I'm not affiliated with any such group, but I did drop by campaign offices in the early part of the summer. I commented to three very separate people on the weaknesses I saw and that the systems would get cracked and approximately when (+/- 1 week). I contacted two of them after the breaches made the news. So far not even one has responded to my finely worded Told You So, accompanied by links to the news articles.

Just to pick a random vulnerability, the staffers did not appear to have Samba or even WebDAV over TLS. Instead it appears that documents were sent around, unencrypted via e-mail as attachments. That works fine if you're wanting to make archiving virtually impossible, waste storage like its going out of style, and ensure that each and every document has a fair chance of being intercepted.

webdavfs

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

Anything based on webDAVs is what you're after. It's a web-standard for transferring data backwards and forwards as https traffic to a webserver. (webDAV is done over plain html) I've implemented it on our network for remote access to user areas.

They can get read access just by using an https address in their browser (and authenticate, obviously).

For read/write treat-it-like-a-normal-folder access, there's support built into mac, windows network folders, and kde.
for example, just typing webdavs://www.example.com/username into konqueror allows you to treat it exactly like a local folder - drag-n-drop, save, delete, create etc. Mount it as a network folder in windows, and again you treat it just like a network drive.

Very cool, and all the tweaks are only server side, and you setup authentication just like you would for any other config in apache (I use a mod to auth directly against our domain server, but there's ALL sorts of auth mods for apache). Can't recommend it enough.

http://www.webdav.org/

Finally there is (at least in theory) an answer: CalDAV. It's big and complex, but there seems to be some real progress in implementing it, just take a look at the interoperability testing events/reports.

Then again, you mentioned Outlook... Just forget everything I said.

Try this: http://www.webdav.org/.

Why not join in and support the effort?

In broad outlines, and incrementally, Google seems to be replacing the need for a centralized computer/filestore with an ubiquitous web fileservice.

Uh, Hello? This is 1997 calling for webDAV, are you there? Don't forget that WebDAV has been around since at LEAST the mid-1990s.

We have a webdav/ssl file repository used in our company. It runs Apache, mod_dav, and openssl, authentication handled by .htaccess files. It's quite secure, offers excellent performance, is highly reliable, and is natively supported by any major OS, and makes backups a SNAP.

Oh, and I'm never handing over my private business accounting data to google. No siree.

We tried Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird with a WebDAV server (even though it deleted two calendars upon upload and barfed on a third, my office loves Sunbird's interface)

RFC2518 and RFC3253 already give you a protocol to make the web editable and you can even version your documents. Have a look at http://www.webdav.org./
So there is no need to invent something new for webbased document management. First servers and clients already exist.

When I first read the CalDAV spec (http://ietf.webdav.org/caldav), I wondered if the same idea (using WebDAV as the underlying protocol) could be used for storing email (instead of IMAP/POP), contact lists, etc.

I'm not too familar with WinFS, but would this give most of the benefits of WinFS but in a more modular and interoperable way?

MacOS X, Windows, KDE and GNOME all support it. It looks just like any other file system to native file managers and your users can only see their files. Since it works over a web server connection (it's just an extension of the http protocol) it's as secure as your web server is.

http://www.webdav.org/

So, yes, if you are using a older version (less than 1.0.6), Subversion does have those particular security flaws. But the current version (1.1.1) certainly doesn't. And you should be keeping track of security fixes no matter what product you are using.

Here in Germany we have a free mail provider (GMX) that offers 1 GB (since a few months), for mails AND for files, and you can access them as a file system(link to German site) using the open WebDAV protocol from linux, windows or mac, so no ugly hacks are neccesary. (Konqueror can do that out-of-the-box, I think)

Also offers free pop and smtp, mail forwarding, and configurable filters

Interface is in German only, and you have to give them an existing German, Austrian or Swiss postal address when you sign up. (but those could theoretically be found on the net.)

http://www.webdav.org/

Make sure the online storage space provider that you choose, supports WebDAV . WebDAV will allow you to map these online storage space as drive letters on your Windows, or as mount points on your OS X/Linux.

I've also done this recently. I did consider paying for a .Mac account, but the only value I'd get out of it (being a technical person who runs his own SMTP/IMAP/HTTP etc. services elsewhere), would be the calendar publishing and backup services. I didn't think these were worth the money, especially given the space restrictions in iBackup on .Mac. Saying this, iBackup is a very nice tool and can do backups to local network shares, CD/DVD etc. so it's not just for use with .Mac.

So I looked at putting together my own alternatives for the .Mac services I thought I would use. First on the list was the calendar sharing. It was easier than I thought to set up mod_dav for Apache. iCal then just published seamlessly to my WebDav service. I also get the added benefit of being able to use the WebDav service to do online backups, which OSX uses without blinking.

I did try to use my WebDav service with Windows XP, but there is a known problem with XP regarding its use of "online folders", i.e. WebDav services. The problem seen with Apache is that XP sends Domain/Username & Password authentication, whereas Apache's mod_dav only wants Username & Password. There is a patch to "fix" this, but personally I drew the line at patching my service to make it work with a broken implementation.

In terms of an iBackup replacement, I've been looking at a few packages. RSyncX seems quite good and popular, as does Impression. However, seeing as though OSX is so nicely Unix-based, I may well use something like Flexbackup or my own scripts based on backup/restore (the BSD tools) or rsync.

"Microsoft uses DCERPC, an extension of TCP/IP, as a transport mechanism."

and this is relevant how?

it is *another* protocol in the sense that nobody would be running it if it weren't for Svn

WebDAV is an open standard that plenty of products support, including your precious arch. I'd hardly describe it as a lame duck.

Note that now they've given up on getting everyone to install Apache2 and use DAV/SSL, the recommended protocol is svnserve, which was invented from scratch.

do you have any idea what you're talking about, or do you just make things up as you go? they seem to still think that DAV is still an option. And how is it possibly bad that they give you the option of a standalone server (as well as tunelling via ssh, or filesystem access)?

the same Anon Coward

Home of WebDAV

Running Apple's Backup Without a .Mac Account

iSync without .Mac (incomplete)

WebDAV -- a standard part of Apache 2 -- is the replacement for FTP. It only uses one TCP connection (HTTP extension), goes anywhere HTTP goes, can be used over HTTPS and thus be as secure as you like.

On the client side, it is already supported by KDE (use URLs like webdavs://server/dir/file.txt), GNOME, and MS Windows. There are also a few command-line clients, such as neon.

WebDAV -- a standard part of Apache 2 -- is the replacement for FTP. It only uses one TCP connection (HTTP extension), goes anywhere HTTP goes, can be used over HTTPS and thus be as secure as you like.

On the client side, it is already supported by KDE (use URLs like webdavs://server/dir/file.txt), GNOME, and MS Windows. There are also a few command-line clients, such as neon.

My company just went through this.

You should check out the Oracle Collaboration Suite. It's the new rave in collaboration software...everything is stored in an Oracle DB and interfaced through an application written on top of Oracle Application Server. Last time I checked, most every document format imaginable was index-able so the collab suite can run a credentials based search, create a quick html view (like cached documents on google), there's full ability to do check-in/check-out, and ability to create "workflow" processes. The main document interface is done over webdav ( oss ) and drives can be mapped just like the old days.

Oh yeah, and it is designed to be a replacement for Exchange/Sharepoint...which means email, contacts, calendaring, and the like are all taken care of. The cost varies on size, but for my company it was about 40% that of a full blown MS collaboration solution (hardware, consulting, migration, software).

If you're into spending extra money, Sharepoint is a great product. I evaluated both, but it came down to security, reliability, and cost.

One thing I like about Macromedia apps is that they fully support WebDAV. And I dont know of any good Linux based Web Development app that supports WebDAV natively. So this move by Macromedia will be very welcomed. WebDAV is IETF stardard for WebBased Document Authoring and Versioning, and is very useful in WebDevelopment. Support for WebDAV in Windows based WebDevelopement apps is what forces me to use windows. If Macromedia ports its apps, I will be able to switch to Linux completely.

I have always looked for a WebDAV client for PDAs. Never found any. With such a wide ranges of PDAs and applications for them, one would think atleast one PDA would support WebDAV.

I think this can be used with WebDAV to provide the missing versioning functionality as well.

Although Steven some nice features, he missed to mention that Nautilus supports WebDAV as well. WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning".
However Nautilus needs to improve the WebDAV functionality. MacOS has the best implementation of a WebDAV client as far as I know.

Good idea. But it is missing WebDAV.
WebDAV can make it very easy to put and retrieve files from the server, using a web browser (over port 80).

Get xythos or webdav.
WebDAV integrated with LDAP solved the file attachment problem for us.
xythos is a commercial implementation of WebDAV.

try goliath Does a great job!

I don't think this is the first time this concept has appeared in the market [1,2].

Frankly, I'm holding out for something with more public, standard, interoperable interfaces, based on WebDAV.

A wiki with Workflow and authentication wrapped around it.
The only thing missing is WebDAV support. With WebDAV support people could collaboratively edit the documents (spreadsheet etc) attached to the webpages.

Sounds like WebDAV + Catacomb to me.

Sounds like WebDAV + Catacomb to me.

gotta have support for WebDAV if you wanna create a HTML editor of the future.

I wish they had included support for WebDAV

WebDAV is supported as Web Folders in Windows, meaning there is no need to download and install SFTP, SCP, FTPS, and other clients. It's also supported natively in Mac OS X

Somethings to watch for: Windows 2000 SP2 had some issues with the mod_dav/mod_ssl combination we're running (uploads failed). Upgrading to SP3 fixed that problem.

Windows makes it a royal pain in the ass if you are planning on using self-signed certificates. I just couldn't figure out how to make IE accept self-signed CA certs. After literally years of seeking this information, I've finally found a solution this past week. This is something you have to consider for your users if you're going to use SSL with self-signed certs: how much can they take the constant popup cert warnings and how happy will they be about going through a 8 step process to get rid of it. Either way: poor user experience, which makes it hard for me to convince my users that DAV is a good thing (they're used to FTP).

OSX natively supports DAV but unless something has changed recently, it does NOT natively support DAV over SSL. You need Goliath for that. At least Goliath has a single "Accept this certificate permanently?" button that actually does what it advertises :p.

I have to say I feel your pain. I'm not trying to do something as ambitious as you (I just wanted something to replace FTP for users that wanted to share files with other users outside of our network), but I've still been frustrated with trying to get the authentication business worked out with different directories having different sets of users that can access them, some with read/write and some with read-only.

To be honest, I've recently started to re-evaluate using DAV for our needs. It just hasn't been as flexible as I had hoped.

-h3

* Uploading files from Windows client machines (e.g. one could not uploaded a large set of directories without lots of manual entry of the names of the Zope containers)

CVS may be the worst version control software in wide use.

Those of you who use and hate CVS may wish to check out SubVersion, a CVS replacement which leverages WebDAV via an Apache module. It can be used locally (i.e., sans server) as well, just like CVS. It's still in beta, but we use it and it's served us a lot better than CVS has. The only problem is some dev tools have (shortsighted) tight integration with one particular VCS or another (like CVS or MSVSS), so using an alternative breaks the "convenience" offered in these tools.

But I say fuck it. Tight integration is for wussies. Pipes and environment variables are the only integration I need.... ;o)

CVS may be the worst version control software in wide use.

Those of you who use and hate CVS may wish to check out SubVersion, a CVS replacement which leverages WebDAV via an Apache module. It can be used locally (i.e., sans server) as well, just like CVS. It's still in beta, but we use it and it's served us a lot better than CVS has. The only problem is some dev tools have (shortsighted) tight integration with one particular VCS or another (like CVS or MSVSS), so using an alternative breaks the "convenience" offered in these tools.

But I say fuck it. Tight integration is for wussies. Pipes and environment variables are the only integration I need.... ;o)

webDAV site

Joe.

Third, since it's well integrated into Windows 2000 and XP, it is really nice and easy to use. With WinXP you can even treat a WebDAV enabled host on the web to look and act like a local file system in all ways. This "redirector" support in Windows XP makes a lot of stuff possible.

True, WebDAV has great potential for being a simple, cross-platform NFS. It already has user authentication and encryption built in, and future updates of the protocol is likely to have access control and versioning (read more at www.webdav.org/specs/). But, you couldn't be more wrong about Windows XP. The WebDAV redirector implementation in Windows XP is incredibly broken, broken to the point where I'm beginning to believe the conspiratory theories.

Firstly, the WebDAV client built into XP doesn't handle digest authentication, forcing you to send passwords in the clear. Secondly, the user authentication is broken in a way that, AFAIK, makes it pretty much incompatible with Apache: When connecting to, say, http://host.net/myfiles/ as 'user' the XP redirector authenticates itself as user@host.net\myfiles' when it should only be sending 'user'. Strangely, while being clearly wrong, this works just fine with IIS, but breaks Apache.

I'm sure there's more, but that's what I've found during the last couple of days when trying to set up a WebDAV server so that I could share files between Mac, Linux and Win boxes easily.

Try taking a look at the number of messages detailing problems with WinXP at www.lyra.org/pipermail/dav-dev/.

It really makes me sad.

So is this any kind of standard WebDAV or just a particular proprietary implementation of similar features in IIS?

I've always been curious about this technology. At one point I even heard talk of a "WebDAV filesystem", but haven't heard of it taking off in any big way yet.

The patent was filed on 3 Feb 1999. Depending on how you read the legalese of the claims, use of CVS (for web development) may or may not be covered by this patent.

Prior art with regard to CVS is easy to prove. Back in 1997 cyclic.com already had a CVS and the Web page. That page references amongst others L.D.Stein's book How to set up and maintain a web site, that makes mention of the use of CVS for version control.

By 1998 the same page on cyclic included a link to Sean Dreilinger's CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects (link to current version). archive.org does not appear to have the original document, but the link is on cyclic.com circa Dec 1998, and Sean's Copyright is dated back to 1997.

Cyclic.com also had a page listing sites using CVS (for web development, 1998).

And just in case anyone didn't get the message, WebDAV (RFC) has a history (and more) going back to 1996. The RFC was published in (surprise surprise) Feb 1999.

Ironically, this was submitted (and rejected) earlier today; faulting myself for not having checked for this thread before submitting (or acting before.)

The "Earth As Art" images are also available for Mac OS X v10.2 users as a .Mac (dot-mac) module for Screen Effects. Type in "EarthAsArt" as the .Mac Membership Name in the preferences to get the show going.

The images were mangled with .Mac Slides Publisher and the resulting slide show tweaked to include PDF intertitles.

The imagery is a pick of about ten random images from the about fourty images available, randomized daily by a Perl script and pushed to the site with HTTP::DAV.

Prior art disclaimer:

[hypsis:~] uucee% HEAD http://homepage.mac.com/EarthAsArt/.Pictures/Slide %20Shows/Public/aleutian-1.jpg
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 22:23:36 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 02:25:50 GMT

The "EarthAsArt" .Mac account is a trial account expiring 1/15/2003, and in no way affiliated with the oganizations the imagery originates from.

Enjoy.

Neat. Under MacOS 9 you'll have to use a real WebDAV client (!= Network Browser) such as Goliath

In case someone is interested, I created a quick and dirty how-to here

Does anyone know how to get past the 137-139 blocks?

WebDAV is how to do file sharing over HTTP with or without SSL. Works with IE5/Windows 2000's Web Folders function.