Thoughts and Notes Ideas that stay with me long enough to get written down

WebDAV on linux – make it writable by me

I just signed up for a box.net .  It's a great service.  What I really wanted it for was WebDAV.  Be aware that they don't officially support WebDAV, but it works, so, if you want to experiment, go for it.

I'm using WebDAV for emacs org-mode.  There's a new feature called mobileorg, that allows you to use an iPhone app for managing your org files.  It depends on you being able to store your files on a WebDAV enabled server.

Fine.  I work mostly on emacs, so it should be pretty easy to mount a directory.  It was, too.

1. Make sure you have the davfs2 package installed.  If you are using Ubuntu/Debian,

   sudo apt-get install davfs2

2. Add something like the following to /etc/fstab

   http://www.box.net/dav /home/username/Documents/box.net davfs rw,users,gid=users,uid=username 0 0

3. Replace username with your Linux username
4. Update the path (/home/username/Documents/box.net) to where you want to mount box.net.  Make sure that directory exists!
5. Update /etc/davfs2/secrets with a line like the following:

   https://webdavhost.net/username/ username password

   replace username and password with your box.net info.

6. Test the mount, using a command like the following

   sudo mount /home/username/Documents/box.net

If that works, you're good to go. The fstab file will remount it whenever you reboot.  The other instruction sets I've seen neglected to include the gid and uid information so I couldn't write to the directory.