access zimbra-files with webdav
Note that this is actually a trivial task which seems to have two unexpected challenges on its way. On Mac it is reported to work out of the box, but under linux (ubuntu 9.10 here) its a bit more challenging.
first we install webdav :
apt-get install davfs2
Then we need to change /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf and add the following line:
use_locks 0
This is mandatory - if you dont use this you will not be able to create new files !!
Now we mount the webdav:
mount -t davfs https://SERVER/dav/USERNAME@SERVER/Briefcase /MOUNTPOINT
You will be asked for username and password and then you have the accept the client-certificate.
You can also mount webdav via fstab and doing auto-authentication using /etc/davfs2/secrets but it seems that there are troubles saving the certificate and avoiding the accept-certificate-step.
The line in fstab looks liks:
https://SERVER/dav/USERNAME@SERVER/Briefcase /MOUNTPOINT davfs rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
IMPORTANT NOTES :
- mlocate does not include webdav-mounted partitions. So if mlocate (or slocate or locate) is started next time it will try to index the whole web-dav-structure. If you have many documents online this will consume bandwidth and considerable cpu-resources on the zimbra-server. Be sure to include davfs or your mountpoint in the appropriate prune-sections in /etc/updatedb.conf
- davfs does not care about loosing connection to the zimbra-server. it will reconnect the very second when zimbra goes online again or the connection is reestablished
- davfs in linux is a very smart person that caches a lot of files in /var/cache/davfs2. This means that if there is any problem uploading a file, davfs will try again and again and again even if you cancel the operation or even unmount the zimbra-share. As soon as you remount it will try it again. Be sure to purge the cache if there are major problems (see zlib-bug in zimbra: http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=42833)