File sharing ....

[Aaron Grewell]

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 08:39 +0100, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 13:27 +0800, Chong Yu Meng wrote:
> 
> > IIRC, another advantage of iFolder is the ability to share documents 
> > over the Internet.  Check out the demo 
> > (http://ifolderdemo.novell.com/iFolder/). If they recently switched from

> > a Windows environment, this really is the most appropriate solution.
> 
> They did not so much as switch from a Windows environment as add support
> for more platforms that support .NET. Linux does that via mono. So
> iFolder (a client is included in SUSE 10) works on Linux, Windows and
> Mac OS X. For Linux other than SUSE, SUSE make the source available.
> 
> > Another option that comes to mind is WebDAV, but I'm not sure how it 
> > works, nor how well it works.
> 
> This is not a file sharing system. It is a way to edit HTML pages.
> WebDAV is a protocol that a web server and HTML editor can use to allow
> editing of web content. Of course, I am sure that someone has hacked
> this protocol to allow much more. So, I won't go so far as to say that
> file sharing via WebDAV is not possible.
> 

WebDAV is a full replacement for FTP.  It adds the ability to write
files via HTTP/S as well as read them.  It can be used to edit HTML
other webpages in place, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.  It
allows full read/write support of arbitrary files from any supported
client across a wide array of platforms.

WebDAV client support is available in the following ways that I know of:
MS Windows Web Folders
KDE's Konqueror
WebDAV Nautilus plugin for Gnome
cadaver CLI client for Linux/Unix
Goliath GUI client for MacOS 9.x and 10.x

Server support:
Apache with mod_dav
IIS 6
Davenport (java servlet that fronts an SMB network via WebDAV)

There's quite a bit more, that's just what I've looked at.  I haven't
really looked at iFolder so I can't compare the two, but WebDAV works
quite well for us at my office.