I've spent the last hour trying to find a functional webdav client for Windows, and I guess I have determined that there isn't one. If someone would demonstrate that I am mistaken, I'd be much obliged. I'm running Win98 (because that's what CDs I have, that's why. No, I won't upgrade to WinXP. Because I'm *NOT* paying for an OS ever again, that's why.)
I just got done with the enormously frustrating installation of DAVExplorer. It was frustrating because I had to make guesses as to the dependencies, and then, when I ended up on the Sun web site, I had to chase links to find the actual file to download. Why can't these Java people just give me something to download and install? With all the JREs and JDKs and JSEs and who knows what else, I never know what it is that I actually have to install to get one of these darned Java apps installed and working. And when I do get it installed, they never actually work as advertised. It's little comfort that they are platform independent when they don't work.
OK, so I got it installed, and it turns out that it does what the name says, and NOTHING ELSE. I can see DAV repositories. I can see the files in them. I can't actually download them, edit them, or anything else that would be actually useful. What is the point of this thing, other than to tease and annoy me?
Is there seriously *no* Windows DAV client? This seems really odd. It's not like the protocol is that complicated.
I've replaced FTP with DAV on my web servers because people with *real* operating systems can get functioning DAV clients to edit the content. But it appears that Windows users are just out in the cold. Having read that Windows XP, or perhaps Windows 2000, and maybe Windows 9x with IE6 installed, could access DAV shares, I thought that they would be able to do this. But on the server I see requests for _vti_bin and other such nonsense, and then the DAV "client" says that it's not a valid "web folder." I venture to say that it's not a valid DAV client. Standards are there for a reason.
OK, I'm done ranting.
There is another webdav client: WebDrive from South River Technologies
http://www.southrivertech.com/products/webdrive/index.html
it seems to be much more functioning as a webdav client and does provide locking of files, however when you lock a file, there's no indication that it's locked from other clients. It just ends up crashing the other system.
Posted by: michelle on December 1, 2003 05:12 PMI had the problem with the _vti_bin request too, it seems that Windows has problems if your DAV folder is a subfolder of your document root and there is some other content in the document root. On a test server, I managed to get DAV working with Windows, having only one folder with the DAV content in the document root.
Posted by: Felix on December 15, 2003 09:48 AMIBackup.com's IDrive client is also a WebDAV client. It comes configured to connect to their servers. Not sure if it's possible to hack it to connect to a different server.
The IDrive 6.1 application seems to have a bug which corrupts the tail end of a file when the file size is reduced. Version 7.0 was recently released but it freezes my computer upon reboot so I had to remove it. Thanks to Michelle (1st posting), I downloaded the South River Tech WebDrive and found it to work quicker than IDrive without corrupting files.
Posted by: John on January 15, 2004 08:29 AMFelix,
Thanks for the pointer! As a test, I remapped my DAV share to be at the site root and things work fine now...
Posted by: Jeffe on March 8, 2004 01:32 AMGood day to all!
I share the same problem - well to an extend.
I am sysadmin for a firm of 70 architects. these guys were paying $500 per month for a "dav" type system with a nice frontend. Buzzsaw - way to expensive for me. so i setup dav on apache running good. I am actually thinking about killing all ftp, but its such a mission to explain to people to -->file-->open-->"as a webfolder" that im starting to wonder here.
I am also running freebsd and it would be nice to have davfs ported to bsd, and adding that as a normal network share to all my clients (local) im hopeing that would get rid of my "slow" problems becuase we have crap bandwidth.
Look. I love dav, works well for me, but what i would love more is a good dav client.
closest i have come is "independant DAV" but they only have ver 1.0 and expect you to pay $ for a app thats NOT WORKING! crazy stuff this.
anyways, so we pickle on with MSIE maybe my wish will come true...
keep well,
Winston
Posted by: Winston on May 24, 2004 09:36 AM