File Sharing with Web Dav?

hi,

i'm working for a university, and it would be extremely helpful if we
could find a way to allow our students and faculty to get to their
share drives from home thru a web interface. Sure an FTP server would
work, but i was looking for something cleaner and easier to use. Just
a simple web interface, where they could enter their windows/active
directory username and password. and it would come up in a browser and
allow them to see the files they had saved on their network drives and
send files to the network drive. I've looked around for off the shelf
software that works with IIS to do this with no luck. I've heard that
webDav can be used for this type of thing.. anyone have any
suggestions or thoughts. i've never done anything like this. i've
searched the web with very little luck. any suggestions would be
appriciated.

-darrell miller

Darrell Miller wrote:
> i'm working for a university, and it would be extremely helpful if we
> could find a way to allow our students and faculty to get to their
> share drives from home thru a web interface. Sure an FTP server would
> work, but i was looking for something cleaner and easier to use. Just
> a simple web interface, where they could enter their windows/active
> directory username and password. and it would come up in a browser and
> allow them to see the files they had saved on their network drives and
> send files to the network drive. I've looked around for off the shelf
> software that works with IIS to do this with no luck. I've heard that
> webDav can be used for this type of thing.. anyone have any
> suggestions or thoughts. i've never done anything like this. i've
> searched the web with very little luck. any suggestions would be
> appriciated.

WebDAV is a good way to go for this. Security is VERY important, of
course. In addition to enabling Active Directory security, it would also
be prudent to do this only over https as all of the traffic will be in
the clear if you use unencrypted http protocol.

If I'm not mistaken, WebDAV is built into IIS (at least the more recent
versions, e.g. the one shipping with Windows 2000). To enable it, just
go into directory permissions and enable "Write" access to the folders
you want. You also want to go into the Security tab for the folder and
turn off "Anonymous" access; this will force IIS to prompt for a
username and password which will be authenticated against the NT
authority for the web server. You should also turn off "Basic
Authentication" to force challenge-response authentication, as basic
authentication passes the username and password in plain text (encoded,
but not encrypted).

To get at this from the client, just set up a "Web Folder" from Internet
Explorer. To do this, you do a "File/Open" from the menu, check the
"Open as Web Folder" box and put in the URL for the folder you want to
access.

--
Jim Patterson
Ottawa, Ont
CANADA

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 00:45:24 GMT, The Other Guy responded to a post
from Darrell Miller <Darrell@Tallskinnyboy.com> who wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows:

>hi,
>
>i'm working for a university, and it would be extremely helpful if we
>could find a way to allow our students and faculty to get to their
>share drives from home thru a web interface. Sure an FTP server would
>work, but i was looking for something cleaner and easier to use. Just
>a simple web interface, where they could enter their windows/active
>directory username and password. and it would come up in a browser and
>allow them to see the files they had saved on their network drives and
>send files to the network drive. I've looked around for off the shelf
>software that works with IIS to do this with no luck. I've heard that
>webDav can be used for this type of thing.. anyone have any
>suggestions or thoughts. i've never done anything like this. i've
>searched the web with very little luck. any suggestions would be
>appriciated.
>
>-darrell miller

Jim P.'s previous post brought about me reading this thread, and
prompted me to contribute. Having dabbled in it just a bit, I found
some web sites that were useful to me in this.

http://www.sitepen.com/support/davInfo.html : this is a web design's
company explanation as to why they use it over FTP -- in short, it's
got a better interface, is more secure, and supports versioning. This
web page also has other support for user setup. See, too, related
links on that page.

http://www.sitepen.com/moddav/FAQ.html : Setting up the Apache module
to provide WebDAV capabilities for this. You'll need to read this to
implement it on your web server.

http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html : More questions answered from
the central resource group, in addition to many other resources.

http://asg.web.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc2518.html : OK, boring RFC 2518, but a
reference.

Personally, I think WebDAV is the way to go. If you are trying to sell
it to your superiors (as opposed to implementing FTP, say), there is
some good material on those sites.

Regards,
TOG

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