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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.