Re: Syncing WebDAV and local File Drive

[Dag Wieers <dag wieers com>]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, Russell Harrison wrote:

> On 3/13/06, Dag Wieers <dag wieers com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, John Summerfied wrote:
> > > Gavin Young wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 12:46 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> > > > > Gavin Young wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > We would like to maintain a WebDAV and local File Drive of the same
> > > > > > files however it is possible that files may be edited through WebDAV as
> > > > > > well as on the local File Drive. Is anyone aware of a way we can sync
> > > > > > these so both have the latest files?
> > > > > >
> > > > > > We looked at mounting the WebDAV drive locally using davfs then using
> > > > > > rsync but so far we have been unable to install davfs on RHEL 4 because
> > > > > > of a coda kernel module dependency.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I'd appreciate any help people can provide.
> > > > >
> > > > > Is there a good reason NFS or similar won't work?
> > > >
> > > > The WebDAV file drive is used when we are outside our company network
> > > > (i.e. home or customer site) and all we have is a web connection.
> > >
> > > I think I could make nfs work:-)
> > > First, a vpn from the (preumably) laptop to home, then mount. You'd want to
> > > think about user authentication (different from host authrosiation which is
> > > what the vpn does).
> >
> > I'm using WebDAV myself because it works from everywhere. It's much harder
> > to access NFS (or SSH) from within a customer's network than it is to
> > access WebDAV. And it fits perfectly with ical/bookmarks/gnomevfs and
> > even Windows.
> >
> > The other solution I have to access external sources over a HTTP proxy, is
> > described on the following page:
> >
> >         http://dag.wieers.com/howto/ssh-http-tunneling/
> >
> > But WebDAV is a solution to works practically everywhere without making
> > things overly complex. (It has some limitations as well and I would not
> > recommend it for concurrent access by different users though).
>
> If you're already using WebDAV you might want to think about using
> subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) to keep your files in sync.  It
> will also do all of the branching, versioning, merging you'll ever need.

I doubt that is possible. Subversion makes use of DAV (plus its own 
extensions) to do the versioning bits, but none of the tools that use DAV 
known anything about versioning, so it simply fails to work.

I use DAV in firefox to synchronize my bookmarks, in sunbird to 
synchronize my calendars and as a remote filesystem to share files. 
(gnome-vfs, lftp, web-folders) Programs are directly using it with URLs 
like: dav://user password:server/path/filename

I fail to see how subversion is more useful with DAV for any of this.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag wieers com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]