WebDAV and MS Vista

Charles Hedrick - Feb. 23, 2007

Some of you have noticed the Vista's WebDAV doesn't work with Sakai. Actually XP's doesn't either, but XP has a second WebDAV implementation that just barely works. They've removed that from Vista, so in Vista you have to use the webdav redirector, and it doesn't work with Sakai.

Eventually I'm going to see if I can fix Sakai to work with Vista. However there's no guarantee that this will be possible, nor when I will get to it.

In the meantime, I recommend looking at some of the shareware Dav tools. I have by no means tried them all, but I have tried two:
BitKinex and Independent Dav.

BinKinex has a two pane interface, with dav on one side and your local files on the other. It lets you drag between the two. However it's sort of complex, and it's hellishly slow over SSH. Without SSH the speed is acceptable.

Independent DAV looks nice, and is fast. However it's only one window. You can drag from a separate Windows explorer into a folder in DAV (note: folder - if you try to drag files onto a file in DAV, the application nearly crashes). But oddly enough, you can't drag the other way. Of course there are also upload and download buttons to handle that. The buttons let you select multiple files and ranges of files, so it's pretty convenient. It works on XP and Vista (at least a late release candidate of Vista). There are buttons to lock and unlock files, but it doesn't do so by default (which is good - that greatly reduces the scope for protocol problems).

It requires the .NET framework. It will point you to the .NET download site if you don't have it.

http://www.independentsoft.de/independentdav/

I'm going to recommend Independent DAV to people on campus who want to use Vista before we have time to figure out whether there are better solutions. Of course Vista has the .NET framework, so you don't have to download that.

If anyone knows of a free tool that lets you move multiple files easily, I'd love to hear about it. There are free tools for OS X, but I haven't seen it for Windows.

Charles Hedrick - Mar. 17, 2007

I've had to give up on DAV with Vista. The Windows redirector has a history of not working well. In XP there is an alternate implementation of DAV, as part of "network places." Unfortunately they removed that from Vista, so there's no alternative to the buggy Windows redirector.

The obvious problem is that it wanted to do propfind on /dav and /dav/ user. However I fixed things to return a dummy result for that, but it still doesn't work. The dummy returns work, because it does propfind for the real URL. But it still fails. I get one of two results, seemingly at random:

• the exchange is perfectly reasonable, but the client gives up and starts over
• the client doesn't send anything at all

For most URLs the client doesn't send anything at all. There's no possible way to fix that on the server, obviously. In order get even this far I have to make a registry change so it will do basic authentication, and I have to modify the server to handle their non- standard user names (domain\user).

We're not the only ones reporting problems. Many DAV-enabled systems that used the Network Places client in XP as a workaround for the buggy redirector don't work with Vista. Their support people know they have a problem, but I don't think they know how bad it is. I got a response saying that my report had been noted, but suggesting that more bug reports are probably necessary in order to get anything to happen.

We're recommending to our Vista users that they try 3rd party tools. I like Independent DAV, though others may have preferred tools. Independent Dav is fast and has a nice user interface. It depends upon the .NET framework, but that's always present in Vista. For XP you may have to load it. If so, they give you instructions.