Subject: WebDAV for personal accounts

From: Frank Lowney <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 10:51:54 -0400

Hello all,

Everyone tells me that it is not possible for WebDAV to be 
implemented in support of individual (personal) accounts on an Apache 
webserver.  I am specifically interested in the Apache webserver that 
ships with both MacOS X and MacOS X Server but I'd suppose that this 
question and any answers to it would generalize to all other 
instances of Apache and mod_dav.  The reason for my interest in this 
is that I want to offer my users (faculty and students) a high level 
of ease-of-use and avoid the use of FTP and Microsft FrontPage Server 
Extensions for security and resource conservation reasons.

The reasons given for this "impossible" task all tend to focus on 
permissions.  Apache web sites all have to be owned by the "www" user 
and this is hard wired into both Apache and mod_dav.  OK, fine, but 
why must this always and forever be so?  Why can't this ownership 
dimension be externalized such that it can be configured by editing 
the hpptd.conf or some other file?

While I can understand the interest in supporting workgroups with all 
of the interesting challenges of protecting co-workers from one 
another, individuals and their work are important as well.  In the 
larger context of the politics of open standards, it does not make 
sense to ignore the most numerous block of web workers and focus 
exclusively upon a small elite population of workgroups.  The client 
side of things is in place to support both individuals and workgroups 
-- all that is needed is a complimentary server-side effort.

Accordingly, I'd like to suggest that http://www.webdav.org/ maintain 
a list of webservers that can be used to extend WebDAV functionality 
to individuals whose web pages are addressed in the form of:

http://www.myserver.edu/~username

-- 
=====================================================================
Dr. Frank Lowney  [email-masked]
     Director, Electronic Instructional Services, a unit of the
     Office of Information and Instructional Technology,
     Professional Pages: http://www.gcsu.edu/oiit/eis/
     Personal Pages: http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu/~flowney
Voice: (478) 445-5260
=====================================================================
We don't make instruction effective, we make effective instruction 
more accessible.

---

From: Jason Crawford <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 01:52:47 -0400

On Friday, 04/25/2003 at 10:51 AST, Frank Lowney 
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> webserver. 
That seems odd to me.  I've not tried mod_dav in about 3 years, but what I 
know of Apache suggests that you can use it for whatever accounts you 
define.  Perhaps I just misunderstand your statement though.   So what 
specifically have you heard prevents one from using it in support of the 
accounts that you mention?

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